MISSISSIPPI WRITERS: Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell

Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell

Major Works

A Sherwood Bonner Sampler, 1869-1884: What a Bright, Educated, Witty, Lively, Snappy Young Woman Can Say on a Variety of Topics
Dialect Tales (1883)
Suwanee River Tales (1884)

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Biography of Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell

Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell was born in Mississippi on February 26, 1849, to Dr. Charles and Mary A Sherwood Bonner Sampler Wilson Bonner, a planter family who lived in Holly Springs. She married Edward McDowell in 1871, who took the family ( a daughter had been born to them) to Texas. After it became clear that McDowell could not support the family, Katharine took the child home to Holly Springs and then set out alone for Boston in search of both educational opportunities and employment. There she found the literary world she longed for and formed a lifelong connection with poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As a teenager, she sold her first romance for publication to the Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture, and her short fiction was published in national magazines between 1875 and 1884 under the name of Sherwood Bonner. She is considered an important writer of humorous and local-color dialect fiction by literary scholars. In this book Anne Razey Gowdy has compiled a collection of work by this unusual woman, which include travel columns and letters; essays, profiles, and sketches; tales and stories; and poetry. Bonner loved to tell stories, loved to write, and loved observing the world around her and the people she met. She returned home to die of cancer at the age of thirty-four.