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Virginia
Spencer Carr selected to be Flavey Memorial Library Distinguished Lecturer
Falvey Memorial Library will welcome Dr. Virginia Spencer Carr as its
2004 Falvey Memorial Library Distinguished Lecturer on Thursday, Nov 18 at 4
p.m. in the Falvey lounge on the first floor. Carr is the author of The
Lonely Hunter: The Biography of Carson McCullers (1975), Dos Passos:
A Life (1984), and the recently released Paul Bowles: A Life.
Nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for her biographies of McCullers and
Dos Passos, Carr has now turned her talents to the life and times of the
composer and author,
 Paul
Bowles who died in 1999 at the age of 89. Bowles’ most famous work of
fiction is The Sheltering Sky, which film director Bernardo
Bertolucci took from page to screen in the 1990 film of the same name
starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich.
Born in West Palm Beach, Fla., on July 21, 1929, Carr knew from the age
of 12 when she took a play-writing course with her mother and brother Don,
that she would someday be a writer. However, she later came to understand
that teaching would be her priority and livelihood. Known as Ginny at Palm
Beach High School, she sometimes rode her horse Bohonkus the four miles from
her home in Northwood Hills to school, where she was a member of the
yearbook and newspaper staffs, a weekly columnist for the Palm Beach
Times, a debater with the Open Forum Club, an athlete and tumbler (in
1948 she was a charter member and trapeze artist in the Florida State
University Flying Circus), and a member of the tennis and softball teams at
Palm Beach High.
Although she liked modern dance, a year of physiology and chemistry as a
physical education major at Florida State University, convinced Virginia
that majoring in English and journalism was a more practical course of
study, given her aptitudes, which led to degrees in English (B.A., FSU;
M.A., UNC-Chapel Hill; Ph.D., FSU) and a career in teaching and
administration on the university level.
She is the mother of three daughters and the grandmother of seven. After
finishing her doctorate at Florida State, where she was named an
“Outstanding Teacher” and a “Grad Made Good,” Virginia moved with her family
to Columbus, Ga., where she was the recipient of a number of awards at what
is now Columbus State University (including an appointment as a senior
Fulbright professor in Poland in 1980-1981). In 1985 she moved to Atlanta to
chair the department of English at Georgia State University, where she was
named the John B. and Elena Diaz Verson Amos Distinguished Chair of English
Letters. Upon her retirement in the fall of 2003, she retained her title as
an emerita distinguished professor. |
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