Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group

By the late 1950s Hollins College had established itself as a nationally competitive academic institution. With the emergence of Louis D. Rubin, Jr.'s writing program, this southern women's school launched some of the most powerful voices in contemporary literature. The careers of Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, and Anne Goodwyn Jones (members of the class of '67) are representative of the impact the Hollins writing community has had. For Smith, Dillard, and their peers, the years at Hollins were an active and complex gestation period for their themes and writing. Annie Dillard, fresh out of college, burst onto the literary scene with her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Lee Smith - who wrote her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, while still at Hollins - has received significant critical attention for novels such as Fair and Tender Ladies and Oral History. Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan's Daughters of Time and Anne Goodwyn Jones's Tomorrow Is Another Day are recognized as major feminist studies of southern literature. In examining the institution's roots, the influence of significant mentors in the 1960s, and the writers themselves in the class of 1967, Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group provides an intriguing analysis of how one women's writing community coalesced, evolved, succeeded, and persevered.