Stark Young Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Stark Young

Stark Young 's worldview was the result of the blending of a perfectly provincial childhood and a remarkably cosmopolitan early manhood. His father, Alfred Alexander Young, was a Como, Mississippi, physician who had ridden with Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate cavalry during the Civil War and who would not allow his son art lessons for fear that he would become an "effeminate weakling, certainly of no credit to our class" (as Young recalls in The Pavilion, 1951). Young's mother, the former Mary Clark Starks, was a beautiful and accomplished Mississippi belle, whose delicate health and early death left a lifelong mark on her son's consciousness. Through his maternal grandmother, Caroline Charlotte McGehee, he came to know the vast clan of McGehee kin, who populate his novels and short stories, scarcely changed from real life or from the tales of them he heard as a boy. The South, he recalled, was a country peopled with ghosts, "warm, close, and human; the dead were often as present as the living," so quite naturally the family legends of Cousin Micajah, Miss Mary Cherry, and Cousin Lucy loomed large in his consciousness when, grown and living in New York, he turned his hand to fiction.

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