Literature is filled with examples of "one hit wonders", first novels often very successful that are never followed by another work, at least not in the author's lifetime. One of American literature's examples is Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. A youthful novella was published long after her death; manuscripts of some other works were apparently destroyed. Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s Raintree County was the only novel he wrote; just as it became a best seller he committed suicide early in 1948. A film version with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift was released in 1957. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is another notable American example. Anna Sewall's Black Beauty and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights are two well known titles from England.
An Alabama example is Red Bone Woman, the only novel published by Carlyle Tillery. Thomas Carlyle Tillery was born in Greenburg, Louisiana, on December 6, 1904. In 1928 he received a B.S. degree from Mississippi State University. For the next decade or more he worked as a statistical clerk in agricultural economics and spent two years as a timekeeper on a Central American banana plantation.
During World War II he served in the U.S. Army and his draft card, filled out on October 16, 1940, tells us a bit more about him. At the time he was living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and working for the Guaranty Income Life, Inc. company. He listed his weight as 160, complexion light, eyes blue, hair red and his height as 5' 6.5". He was apparently not married at this time, since he listed his sister as the person "who will always know your address." I found his card via Ancestry.com; you can see it below.
After his service in the military, Tillery next appears in Tuscaloosa, where he studied for three years under famed University of Alabama English and creative writing professor Hudson Strode. Did he come to Tuscaloosa to take Strode's classes? I have found no information about Tillery writing or publishing before or after his one published novel. Tillery apparently did not graduate from UA; I did not find him listed in a 2008 directory of university alumni.
On July 10, 1949, the following article appeared in the Tuscaloosa News [page 8]: "TUSCALOOSA STORE CLERK SIGNS CONTRACT FOR NOVEL: Carlyle Tillery Is Author Of 21st Book from Strode Class." The article noted Tillery as, "a kindly, quiet man, fortyish ,with rather sparse red hair, a freckled face, and glasses that hit a little farther down his nose than usual. On week days he ambles busily but unobtrusively up and down the aisles of Jitney Jungle Super Market No. 1 where he is employed in the stock room."
The Hoole Special Collections at the University of Alabama Libraries has some material on Tillery "most notably" the galley proofs of his novel. I am indebted to their online description for some of the information above.
At the time of his death Tillery was married to Ruby Wilson Tillery; you can see her photo below. I did not find marriage info for Ruby and Carlyle. I did find a reference to a Thomas C. Carlyle getting married on June 15, 1952 in Tuscaloosa County. Perhaps that is the date.
Ruby earned a nursing PhD in 1981. She was the author of "Differences in Perceived Relationships of Selected Components of Curriculum Implementation Prior to and Following Graduate Study by Louisiana Nurse Teachers Funded for Master's Level Study" which was her dissertation at the University of Alabama.
Carlyle Tillery died on January 23, 1988 in Tuscaloosa. An obituary published the next day in the Tuscaloosa News listed among his survivors wife Ruby, daughter Sarah and son Edward. Ruby died January 10, 2007, also in Tuscaloosa. She was 84, having been born November 23, 1922, in Woodville, Jackson County, Alabama. Memorial services for both were held at Forest Lake United Methodist Church, where they were presumably members.
As you can read below in the blurbs on the back of the paperback edition, Tillery's one novel received good notices. The "Literary Guidepost" review by W.G. Rogers [also below] declares, "Tillery is a name to add to the large list of distinguished southern writers."
So what happened? Where did Tillery's literary impulse come from and where did it go after publication of Red Bone Woman? Did he continue to work at Jitney Jungle until retirement? Perhaps one day a descendent will enlighten us.
I'm happy to be the enlightening descendant. First, that picture from Centenary is my father. Doubtless names and pictures were confused. The bedmaking nurse is not my mother. She's in the larger picture from which that fragment appears.
ReplyDeleteDaddy absolutely came to Tuscaloosa for Hudson Strode's class. He attended the University of Alabama's Strode weekend symposium (perhaps called by a different name) in the early 80's. As a matter of fact, Red Bone Woman might not have been published if it weren't for Hudson. Pearl Buck, a prolific writer and married to Richard Walsh, founder of John Day publishing, was a guest of the Strodes. Instead of the usual books provided on a guest's bedside table, she found only my father's manuscript. She took it home, and the rest is history.
My father's literary impulse stayed with him for many years. He continued to revise They Searched for a City, a sequel to Red Bone Woman, and another book, about a Methodist minister and his family's experiences with the frequent moves of that earlier time. Sadly, those efforts were not accepted for publication, despite appreciation for individual sections. His oldest grandchild, Benjamin Caldwell, owns the rights to those manuscripts.
Daddy's focus as he aged was on the development of a truly color-blind society. Today, this is considered naive, but in his time, he was a radical--something unexpected from one who was gentle and soft-spoken. He believed that the federal government should supply the equivalent of "40 acres and a mule." He wrote about the plight of black farmers and the need for federal land to be given for new Black farms.
Yes, my parents were members of Forest Lake UMC. They had been in the 50's after they married and returned their membership when they returned to Tuscaloosa from some 20 years in Louisiana. They lived in Lafayette from 1961-1981, where my mother was, first, on and then led the College of Nursing faculty.
Daddy spoke very little about his Army days. He spent them in the Quartermaster Corps in Mississippi. A statistician could be expected to be a whiz at simpler computations, and he was. He told me he enlisted in 1940 because he could see war coming. He'd followed the newspaper accounts of WWI, and even "grown folks" (his older sister's words) asked him to describe about the war's progress, although he was only 14 on Armistice Day. One curious aspect of Army life was that only there was he ever called Thomas, his first name. This his mother's side, where people were often called by middle names. My mother said that whenever anyone called and asked for Tom, she knew it was one of his Army buddies.
Thanks for much for your lengthy comments and its wonderful details! Please contact me at wrightaj21 at gmail.com to discuss further.
DeleteYou are certainly welcome. I was touched to find so much about him already here. You are quite the researcher.
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