Now, when authors write historical fiction – particularly one that is not about a specific event, like, say, World War 2, or a person, like, say, the ever popular Ann Boleyn – my first question is why have they decided to write about a past time? Cold Sassy Tree is set in the American South in 1906, though if I remember back to the first CD correctly, the first person narrator, Will Tweedy, is telling the story some 8 years later (which would make it on the verge of the World War 1 – not that that is relevant given the USA’s delayed entry into the war.) According to Wikipedia, Burns was a journalist and columnist, and it wasn’t until 1971 that she “began writing down family stories as dictated by her parents. It, Leaving Cold Sassy, was apparently published unfinished, but with her notes, in 1992. She started it, but died of a heart attack in 1990 before finishing it. It was so successful that her readers pleaded for more, for a sequel, that is. Born in 1924, she didn’t publish Cold Sassy Tree, which was her only completed novel, until 1984.
From what I’ve read in Wikipedia, Olive Ann Burns was another late bloomer (albeit not an Australian one of course). As I explained in my post last year on Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees, we are slowly listening to some of the audiobooks we gave Mr Gums’ mother in the last years of her life, and have just finished Olive Ann Burn’s epic-length, Cold Sassy Tree.
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