Grau was born on July 8, 1929 in New Orleans, LA. As an adolescent she moved to Montgomery, Alabama and went to Booth (elementary) School until her high school years, when she moved back to New Orleans and attended Ursuline Academy. She continued her studies as an English major at the Newcomb College at Tulane University, graduating with the class of 1950, and later completed one year of graduate studies. Grau's original career plans were to get a Ph.D.in English and teach and write, but the university had different plans. Grau explains, “It seemed like a good idea... But, anyway the head of the department said no women would be teaching assistants in his department... Just about the time my free-lance pieces began to show. So I said, O.K., follow where the doors open.”
From these free-lance works came a well-received debut publication, The Black Prince and Other Stories (1955). A book in which most of the stories were centered around black characters was almost unheard of at the time. “When I started writing black stories," she says, "it just was not done.... And then there was a flip-flop after the 1960s, and that's all they wanted." On August 4th of that same year she married James Kern Feibleman, a Tulane professor, and with him bore two sons and two daughters: Ian James, Nora Miranda, William Leopold, and Katherine Sara.
Three years later she published The Hard Blue Sky. In this novel, Grau showcases her ability to describe nature; where critic Ann Pearson notes that even the title “indicates the dominance of the elements over the lives of the...fishermen.” The story is set on a primitive island, Isle aux Chiens, at the mouth of the Mississippi. This book does not carry a traditional plot set-up. On the other hand, Grau writes “interwoven episodes and flashbacks to dramatize a series of crises in the lives of individual islanders." Drama laden with the passions of love and sex ensue as these island citizens await the first hurricane of the season.
One could describe Grau as a “novelist of manners” in that her approach to her characters is unsentimental which allows her to exercise perfect objectivity. The House on Coliseum Street (1961) was indeed “a novel of manners.” As she often does, Grau “explores the perversion of ethics in modern society." This story of “divorce and sexual promiscuousness” is meant to criticize the moral hypocrisy of the Southern upper-class.
One of the more prominent themes in Grau's work is the interaction between whites and black in the South at a time when the two were separated by law. She is a “white author who deals with... the black subculture,” an “anomaly” of her time. Yet, unlike many novels of the genre, her black characters are not mere caricatures of servants and house maids. Rather, she writes of the deep South, where interaction between races is inevitable and almost always controversial.
Her next work would be the most famous to-date. In 1964, her novel The Keepers of the House received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In this story, Southern white widower Bill Howland, after his late wife dies, secretly marries an African American woman, Margaret. They have three children and even more grandchildren that are “mired in racial politics." Grau achieved such noteworthy acclaim by separating herself from the usual genre of female Southern writers. Time magazine critic R. Z. Sheppard said, “...Grau has usually played to her strength—a cautious application of talent to Southern traditions and people she knows best.”
Grau followed with The Condor Passes (1971) and Evidence of Love (1977). Her most recent work is Roadwalkers, published in 1994. This story follows the life of Baby, a black girl growing up in the Depression-era South. Her journey begins by wandering the countryside for food and shelter. After a confrontation with a white land owner, she is sent to an orphanage where nun Rita Landry takes over the narration for her teen years. After leaving the orphanage at 18, Grau's books takes a bold shift to the first person in which Baby gives the account to her daughter, Nanda, who grows up with all of the privileges her mother lacked. The story ends with the despairing story of her unfortunate marriage. While the critics looked to the story with “a mixture of admiration and puzzlement," the story nevertheless adds to her collection of racially controversial, yet objective portraits of the old South.
Photograph provided by washingtonpost.com
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