This Goodly Land

Gail Godwin (June 18, 1937–present)

Other Names Used

• Gail Kathleen Godwin: full name

Alabama Connections

• Birmingham, Jefferson County: birthplace

Selected Works

• Godwin, Gail. The Perfectionists. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Rpt. New York: Ballantine, 1996.
• Godwin, Gail. Dream Children: Stories. New York: Knopf, 1976. Rpt. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.
• Godwin, Gail. Violet Clay. New York: Knopf, 1978. Rpt. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. Rpt. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.
• Godwin, Gail. A Mother and Two Daughters. New York: Viking Press, 1982. Rpt. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994.
• Godwin, Gail. A Southern Family. New York: Morrow, 1987. Rpt. New York: Avon Books, 1997. Rpt. New York: Perennial, 2002.
• Godwin, Gail. Father Melancholy's Daughter. New York: Morrow, 1991.
• Godwin, Gail. Queen of the Underworld: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2006.
• Godwin, Gail. The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961-1963. Ed. Rob Neufeld. New York: Random House, 2006.
• Godwin, Gail. Unfinished Desires. New York: Random House, 2009.

Literary Awards

• Alabama Author Award, Alabama Library Association, 1979, for Violet Clay
• “Amanuensis: A Tale of the Creative Life” included in Prize Stories 1980: The O. Henry Awards
• Award in Literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1981
• Thomas Wolfe Memorial Award, Western North Carolina Historical Association, 1987, for A Southern Family
• Alabama Author Award, Alabama Library Association, 1993, for Father Melancholy’s Daughter

Biographical Information

Gail Godwin was born in Birmingham, Ala., during a time when her father was working at a summer job nearby. The following fall, her family moved back to their native North Carolina. Her parents divorced, when she was quite young, after her father deserted the family. She grew up in Asheville, N.C., living with her mother and grandmother. Her mother supported the family working as a junior college instructor, a newspaper reporter, and an author of romance stories for popular magazines. Godwin read extensively as a child and wrote her first story at age nine. Her mother remarried when Godwin was eleven, and the family moved frequently after that. Godwin reunited with her father at her high school graduation and lived with him briefly; he committed suicide while she was in college.

Godwin attended Peace Junior College in Raleigh, N.C., then transferred to the University of North Carolina, from which she graduated in 1959 with a BA in journalism. After graduation, she worked for a year as a newspaper reporter in Miami, then moved to London where she worked at the US Travel Service at the US Embassy there. In 1967, she was accepted into the Writers’ Workshop program at the University of Iowa, where she earned an MA in English in 1968 and a PhD in 1971. Her PhD dissertation was published in 1970 as her first novel, The Perfectionists. In the following years, she has written extensively, both novels and short stories. She has won several fellowships, including a Yaddo residency in 1972 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975. She also has created librettos for musical works for which her partner, Richard Starer, composed the music. She lives in Woodstock, N.Y., and is still publishing.

Interests and Themes

Godwin writes stories of modern, often creative, women who discover their true selves through dealing with crisis, frequently brought about by a death in the family. She portrays the complexities of relationships, both between men and women and among family members. Many of her books have Southern settings.

For More Information

Please check your local library for these materials. If items are not available locally, your librarian can help you borrow them through the InterLibrary Loan program. Your librarian can also help you find other information about this author.

There may be more information available through the databases in the Alabama Virtual Library. If you are an Alabama citizen, AVL can be used at your public library or school library media center. You can also get a username and password from your librarian to use AVL at home.

Reference Books

• Hill, Jane. Gail Godwin. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.
• Kissel, Susan S. Moving On: The Heroines of Shirley Ann Grau, Anne Tyler, and Gail Godwin. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996.
• Xie, Lihong. The Evolving Self in the Novels of Gail Godwin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Reference Web Sites

• Gail Godwin: Bookfest 01 [Webcast]. 2001. Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=3430.
• "Gail Godwin". Bhamwiki. 2007. http://www.bhamwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Gail_Godwin.
• Godwin, Gail. Gail Godwin. 2004. http://www.gailgodwin.com .
• Spell, Carrie. "Gail Godwin". The Encyclopedia of Alabama. 2010. Alabama Humanities Foundation. http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2529.
• Swaim, Don. "Audio Interviews with Gail Godwin". Wired For Books. Ohio University. http://www.wiredforbooks.org/gailgodwin/index.htm.

Location of Papers

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Photo by Beth Bliss; courtesy of Gail Godwin.

Last updated on May 21, 2009.