Doris Betts

Doris Betts (June 4, 1932 – April 21, 2012) was a short story writer, novelist, essayist and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emerita at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was the author of three short story collections and six novels.

Life

Doris June Waugh was born in Statesville, North Carolina in 1932, the only child of Mary Ellen and William Elmore. In 1950 she graduated from Statesville High School, and attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While an undergraduate student she married then law student Lowry Betts, who later became a district judge in Chatham and Orange Counties, North Carolina; they had three children. She won the Mademoiselle College Fiction contest during her sophomore year (1953) for the story "Mr. Shawn and Father Scott".

After working as a newspaper reporter for a number of years, she joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1966. She received the UNC Putnam Book Prize in 1954 for her first book, The Gentle Insurrection, three Sir Walter Raleigh Awards (1958, 1965, and 1973) for the best fiction books by a North Carolinian, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Writing (1958–1959), the North Carolina Award and Medal (1975), the Distinguished Service Award for Women (Chi Omega), and the John Dos Passos Award from Longwood College. She has also written articles for professional journals, lectured at writers' conferences, and delivered speeches on major college campuses. In 1980 she was named a UNC Alumni Distinguished Professor of English. She received the Tanner Award for distinguished undergraduate teaching in 1973 and the Katherine Carmichael Teaching Award in 1980.

An adaptation of "The Ugliest Pilgrim", the most widely printed of her stories, won Best Live Action Short at the 54th Academy Awards as a short film titled "Violet", and in 1998 was the basis of a musical that won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Coinciding with her retirement from teaching, an endowed chair was named in her honor, The Doris Betts Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing. She served as the Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Death

Betts died at her Pittsboro, North Carolina home of lung cancer on April 21, 2012, aged 79, according to her son, Erskine Betts.

Awards

• G.P. Putnam-U.N.C. Booklength Fiction prize, 1954
• Sir Walter Raleigh Best Fiction by Carolinian award, 1957, for Tall Houses in Winter; 1965, for Scarlet Thread
• Guggenheim Fellow 1958
• North Carolina Medal, 1975, for literature
• Parker award, 1982–1985, for literary achievement
• John dos Passos award, 1983
• American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal of Merit, 1989, for short story
• Academy Award, for Violet.

Books

Short story collections

• The Gentle Insurrection (1954)
• The Astronomer and Other Stories (1966)
• Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories (1973)

Novels

• Tall Houses in Winter (1957)
• The Scarlet Thread (1965)
• The River to Pickle Beach (1972)
• Heading West: a novel (1981)
• Souls Raised from the Dead (1994)
• The Sharp Teeth of Love (1998)

External links

• "The big questions: an interview with Doris Betts", Christian Century, October 8, 1997, by Dale W. Brown