This Goodly Land

Alice Fellows (November 13, 1928–present)

Other Names Used

• Alice Strauss: married name

Alabama Connections

• Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County: birthplace, childhood residence, education, brief adult residence

Selected Works

• Fellows, Alice. Laurel: A Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950.

Biographical Information

Alice Fellows was born and grew up in Tuscaloosa, Ala. She attended the University of Alabama and earned her baccalaureate degree in 1948. At the University, she was a member of Hudson Strode’s fiction writing class, where she began working on her novel Laurel. After graduation, Fellows was awarded a fellowship from the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship Trust which allowed her to complete the work. Laurel was published in 1950. A television adaptation, Dead on the Vine, was broadcast in 1951 as part of the Ford Theater series.

Fellows moved to New York City and spent two years at Columbia University pursuing graduate studies in history. After her marriage to a fellow history student, Fellows moved with her husband to Exeter, N.H. They left Exeter in 1959 and spent two years in Tuscaloosa, then moved to Bloomington, Ind., where she finished her master’s degree. In the 1960s and 1970s, Fellows and her family divided their time between Bloomington and Europe. When she and her husband divorced in 1977, Fellows returned to New York City and became an editor for the Simon and Schuster publishing company. In the 1990s, Fellows began a new career as a writer of travel books. She has recently returned to fiction writing. Her daughter, Victoria Strauss, is also a novelist.

Interests and Themes

Alice Fellows’s novel, Laurel, is about the dangers of allowing false values and a sense of entitlement to control one’s life and actions. It is set in a small Southern city similar to Tuscaloosa.

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 Articles

• "Alice Fellows". Alabama Librarian Jan. (1952): 4.

Last updated on Jul 23, 2009.