Joan Williams

Fiction writer Joan Williams (1928-2004) was raised in Memphis, Tennessee. After schooling at the Miss Hutchinson School for Girls, she attended Bard College. During her time at Bard, Williams met and began a professional and personal relationship with novelist William Faulkner, a relationship that has overshadowed her own successful career as a novelist. Writing career Williams published her first stories while a student at Bard College. "Rain Later" received the College Fiction Prize from Mademoiselle , and four years later, she published a sequel in the same venue. These two stories together formed the nucleus of her first novel, "The Morning and the Evening," whose publication led novelist William Styron to call Williams a "greatly gifted writer." Personal life Williams and Faulkner's relationship was both personal and professional, but Williams never found the personal part of it satisfying: correspondence between the two writers shows Faulkner's ongoing frustration with Williams' ambivalence. In 1954, she married sportswriter and editor Ezra Bowen, whose mother was biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen. Williams and Bowen had two sons and three grand-daughters. From 1984 to 1994, she lived with Atlantic editor Seymour Lawrence, who had accepted a story of hers in 1952. She passed in Atlanta Georgia, surrounded by family, Easter morning. Works