Frances Newman (1888–1928)

Newman was born in 1883, the youngest daughter in a prominent Atlanta family. Her father, Judge William T. Newman, was a Confederate war hero who became a U.S. district judge. Her mother, Fanny Percy Alexander, was a direct descendant of the founder of Knoxville, Tennessee. Newman attended the Calhoun Street School and Washington Seminar in Atlanta and finishing schools in Washington, D.C., and New York City. She briefly enrolled in Agnes Scott College in Decatur and completed a library science degree at the Atlanta Carnegie Library in 1912. Newman worked for a year as a librarian at Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee but returned to Atlanta in 1914, after a Mediterranean tour, to work at the Atlanta Carnegie Library. Here she began her writing career with witty reviews for the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution, attracting the attention of Virginia novelist James Branch Cabell and critic H. L. Mencken. She also wrote her first novel, The Gold-Fish Bowl (1921), but was unable to find a publisher. Newman continued at Carnegie Library until 1923, when she left to study at the Sorbonne and to complete The Short Story's Mutations, a collection of stories she translated from five languages. Upon her return in 1924 she accepted a position as librarian at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Desiring more time to devote to writing, Newman took a year's leave of absence from Georgia Tech in August 1925. She was accepted at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, for the next summer with recommendations from Sherwood Anderson and Mencken. There she was able to complete The Hard-Boiled Virgin in two months. An immediate best-seller, the novel enabled her to continue writing full-time. Newman returned to Peterborough the following summer and began work on Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers. Despite frequent illnesses, she completed the novel by the end of January 1928 and left for Europe before it was released.