Read like a famous SC author. 8 of them reveal their favorite South Carolina books

“That’s so hard,” was Josephine Humphrey’s response when asked to name her favorite book by a South Carolina author.

It was a sentiment offered by many of the South Carolina authors who were asked by The State to pick a favorite. In fact, many couched their responses by saying, “One of my favorites.”

But they came through to offer a different sort of holiday list that could be entitled “read like a famous South Carolina author.”

The parameters were pretty loose — be from South Carolina or have lived in South Carolina.

“What a fun article, and I’m going to resist the urge to list one of Pat Conroy’s books since I’m a tad biased,” said Cassandra King, author of five novels and two non-fiction books including “Tell Me a Story, My Life with Pay Conroy” (her husband, who died in 2016).

She selected “South Carolina: A History,” by Walter Edgar, a longtime history professor at the University of South Carolina who retired in 2012. He continues to host “Walter Edgar’s Journal” on South Carolina Public Radio.

“When I first moved to South Carolina, I realized how little I knew of my adopted state’s history and Dr. Edgar’s book proved to be an invaluable resource,” King said. “It’s so beautifully written that it reads like a compelling novel and is so comprehensive that I felt like a native South Carolinian after completing it.”

Pressed about her husband’s work as a bonus question, King chose “The Water is Wide,” Conroy’s memoir about the year he spent teaching on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina.

“It was a year that changed his life and one that introduced a group of poor black children to a world they did not know existed,” his website says.

It was made into a movie called “Conrack” in 1974 starring Jon Voight.

Asked what she suspected was Conroy’s favorite, King said her husband often recommended Humphreys’ book “Rich in Love,” a story about a traditional Lowcountry family dealing with the aftermath of the matriarch leaving for good. This book, too, was made into a movie of the same name starring Albert Finney and Jill Clayburgh. The 1992 movie was filmed in Charleston and Mount Pleasant.

For her part, Humphreys chose a book that she said changed her life — “Gal: A True Life” by Ruthie Bolton.

“It still strikes me as miraculous,” Humphreys said. “She was a young mother trying to write the story of her life as a gift for her children and she came to me for advice.”

Bolton needed help with organization, grammar, spelling, all fru-fru stuff of writing, but she had the hardest element of all.

“She was a truly gifted storyteller,” Humphreys said.

They met twice a week for a couple of months. Bolton talked. Humphreys recorded. Before long, there was something for her children. There was also a book, accepted for publication by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It rose to No. 11 on the bestseller list and perhaps best of all was featured on Oprah.

“I dearly love this book and I consider the writer a genius. I’ve been asked if I wrote it; but every word was hers, told in her own witty, brave, heart-breaking, triumphant voice,” Humphreys said.

Edgar chose Ron Rash as his favorite author, followed closely by King.

“I’d recommend Rash’s “Saints at the River,” a story about a girl whose body is trapped in a South Carolina river and the confrontation between her family and conservationist who don’t want the river harmed and King’s “Moonrise” about a woman who tries to fit into her new husband’s world after his wife’s untimely death and the secrets that surround it.

Victoria Benton Frank, whose first book “My Magnolia Summer” is set for publication next June, chose “Plantation,” the second book of Dorothea Benton Frank, her mother.

Dot Frank published 20 best sellers before she died in 2019, all set in the South Carolina Lowcountry. “Plantation” centers around Miss Lavinia, the eccentric matriarch who Frank said was her mother’s most beloved character.

“I think she wanted to be her when she grew up,” Frank said.

The story revolves around the homecoming of Miss Lavinia’s daughter who had vowed never to return.

Frank’s book centers around a homecoming, too. A chef at a struggling New York restaurant returns to Sullivan’s Island when her grandmother is involved in a life-threatening accident to discover her family’s restaurant struggling as well.

Frank said among her mother’s favorite books was Pat Conroy’s “The Prince of Tides.” Besides Conroy, Frank was a fan of Bret Lott, a College of Charleston professor and author of 14 books including “Jewel,” an Oprah selection, and anything Josephine Humphreys wrote, Frank said.

Ron Rash, author of six novels, including “Serena,” seven short story collections and three books of poetry, also picked “The Prince of Tides,” but added “I would insist that George Singleton’s “You Want More” and John Lane’s “Neighborhood Hawks” be in the stockings.

Singleton’s book is a collection of short stories, one of eight to be published. The Wofford College professor also has published two novels and a book about writing fiction.

Lane, who was a longtime English professor at Wofford and founding director of the college’s environmental studies center, is a prolific nature writer.

“I love Conroy’s novel for its great-heartedness and vivid sense of South Carolina’s low country,” Rash said. “Singleton is laugh-out-loud funny, but his characters also reveal profound insights into our human condition. Mary Alice Monroe and John Lane are writers who evoke the natural beauty and wonder of our state, and our need to preserve it.”

Mary Alice Monroe, bestselling author of 27 novels, selected a holiday book and a historical novel as favorites — Patti Callahan Henry’s “Once Upon a Wardrobe” and Lindy Carter’s “The Rice Birds.” Henry’s book is a historical novel centered on a teenage girl meeting C.S .Lewis right after publication of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and the meaning of Narnia.

Carter’s “The Rice Birds” is also a historical novel, set in pre-Civil War Charleston.

She said in a book blurb the book reveals “the determination, perseverance, and courage of remarkable women in search of self, family, and home.

“I loved it,” she said.

Tommy Hays, author of four books and a retired executive director of the Great Smokies Writing Program and lecturer emeritus in the Master of Liberal Arts program at University of North Carolina Asheville, picked two favorites — “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson and “Debby” by Max Steele.

Woodson wrote a memoir in free verse about a childhood spent between Ohio, her father’s home, and South Carolina, her mother’s, in the 1960s. Note about Woodson, her website has a section on fun facts that includes this: “I can only write with my notebook turned sideways. When I was a kid, I wrote with it turned upside down.”

Hays called the book one of the best he’s ever read.

“I love Woodson’s compassionate and complex portrait of her family, and the evolution of their lives, going back between Greenville and New York. I especially love the touching sections about staying with her grandparents in Nicholtown. As someone who grew up in Greenville, I knew West Greenville and Nicholtown only from the outside. So reading Brown Girl Dreaming was a revelation to me, like I was entering the private lives of some of the Black families I had known only on a surface level as a child.”

“Debby” published in 1950, is about a woman released from a home for delinquent women who goes to work as a nanny.

Hays said. “Max Steele and Debby were so important to me because he was the first writer I felt personally connected to even though I wouldn’t meet him until decades later.”

He said Steele wrote about places and people he knew.

“What resonated with me in his writing was the warmth and pathos as well as his wonderful sense of humor,” Hays said.

Susan M. Boyer, author of 12 books set in the Lowcountry, said it was tough to select one book.

“I love novels written by so many South Carolina authors. I love Pat Conroy’s use of language, of course. Dorothea Benton Frank’s novels have a special place in my heart as well.”

Forced to choose, though, she selected one of Mary Alice Monroe’s older titles.

“The portrayal of the shrimping industry in “Last Light Over Carolina “ is enlightening and well done. And of course, Mary Alice’s vivid depiction of her coastal setting is masterful, as always. But I most love this book for its unflinching exploration of a mature marriage,” she said.

This story was originally published December 14, 2022 at 8:00 AM.