Glasgow, << GLAS goh, >> Ellen (1873-1945), was an American author known for her novels about the South. Glasgow criticized the Southern fiction of her time as too romantic and sentimental. She believed the South needed a more realistic awareness of itself. Many of Glasgow’s novels examine life and values in Virginia from 1850 to the 1900’s. She described the great social and political changes that took place during this period, when the South was changing from an agricultural to a more industrial society. Many of her novels deal with the role of women in the changing Southern social structure.
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born into an aristocratic family in Richmond, Virginia, on April 22, 1873. Her fiction strongly reflects her Southern heritage. The first of Glasgow’s 19 novels was The Descendant (1897). She began her long series of novels on Virginia society with her next work, The Voice of the People (1900). Glasgow’s other major novels include Barren Ground (1925), The Romantic Comedians (1926), The Sheltered Life (1932), and Vein of Iron (1935). She won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for In This Our Life (1941). Her essays on the art of writing fiction were collected in A Certain Measure (1943). Her autobiography, The Woman Within, was published in 1954, after her death. She died on Nov. 21, 1945.
