Bøger af Beverly Lowry

The stunning true story of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author’s life and perception of home.“Mix together a bloody murder in a privileged white family, a false accusation against a Black man, a suspicious town, a sensational trial with colorful lawyers, and a punishment that didn’t fit the crime, and you have the best of southern gothic fiction. But the very best part is that the story is true.” —John GrishamIn 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home: stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn’t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man's presence was uncovered. When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, the governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension of her sentence and she was set free. In Deer Creek Drive, Beverly Lowry—who was ten at the time of the murder and lived mere miles from the Thompsons’ home—tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications today, and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi.

Madam C. J. Walker is an American rags-to-riches icon. Born to former slaves in Louisiana in 1867, she went on to become a prominent African American businesswoman and the first female self-made millionaire in U.S. history. The story of her transformation from a laundress to a tremendously successful entrepreneur is both inspirational and mysterious, as many of the details of her early life remain obscure. In this superior biography, Beverly Lowry's abundant research fleshes out Walker's thinly documented story and frames it in the roiling race relations of her day.Walker grew up illiterate and worked as a washerwoman well into her thirties before staking her future on a "Wonderful Hair Grower.” Defying all odds, Walker learned to read and write, mastered marketing and spin, and built a booming cosmetics empire that provided lucrative work for thousands of black women and allowed her to engage in philanthropy and civil rights activism until her death in a Westchester mansion in 1919. Spanning from the antebellum South to the Harlem Renaissance, Lowry brings this intriguing and important woman vividly to life.

Actress Pauline Terry is so successful in a performance of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya that one critic calls her "the perfect Sonya." But her life is not what she expected when she left Texas for Broadway. She swims in a fish tank in a New Jersey bar to make a living, most auditions do not result in callbacks, and her marriage is shaky. Called home by her father's imminent death, she confronts both the past she thought she'd left behind and her uncertain future. For solace she turns to her aunt's former husband, Will Hand, a professor and nature writer. But their affair is brief and leaves her more uncertain than ever. Back in New York, Pauline realizes that her life onstage cannot make up for the emptiness of her life offstage. Her return to Texas was a transforming experience, leading her ultimately to come to terms with her childhood memories, her marriage, her dramatic ambitions, and finally, herself. The Perfect Sonya, first published in 1987 by Viking Penguin, won the Jesse Jones Award for the Best Novel of 1987 from the Texas Institute of Letters.