Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist dies

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Shirley Ann Grau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer whose stories and novels told of both the dark secrets and the beauty of the Deep South, has died. She was 91.

Grau died Monday in a New Orleans-area memory care facility of complications from a stroke, her daughter Nora McAlister of Metairie said Wednesday. She said the family is not planning a funeral or memorial service for her, in accordance with her mother’s wishes.

Grau won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for her fourth book, “The Keepers of the House.”

The book drew critical praise but also threatening phone calls for its depiction of a long romance between a wealthy white man and his black housekeeper in rural Alabama.

Grau said Ku Klux Klansmen, angry over the book amid the heat of the civil rights movement, tried to burn a cross on her yard in Metairie, a New Orleans suburb.

They apparently forgot to bring a shovel, and couldn’t drive the cross into the ground, so set it on fire flat on the lawn, she told The Associated Press in 2003.

Her six novels and four short story collections were all set in the Deep South, from New Orleans to north Louisiana and Alabama.

Grau was born in New Orleans and grew up in Mobile, Alabama, the daughter of a physician. In the 2003 interview, she recalled that she was fascinated as a child with Greek and Latin, but also loved roaming the woods. Critics would later note in her fiction meticulous descriptions of flowers, plants and trees.

Grau’s husband, James Kern Feibleman, a businessman and chairman of Tulane’s philosophy department, died in 1987 at 83.

They also are survived by daughter Katherine F. Miner of Houston; sons Ian J. Feibleman of Georgetown, Texas, and William L. Feibleman of Metairie; and six grandchildren.