The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau is an award-winning novel (1965 Pulitzer Prize) about the Howland family who live in Wade County, Alabama. William Howland is a farmer who falls in love with his black housekeeper, Margaret. Years later, Abigail Tolliver, William’s granddaughter, is living in the same house and feeling the racially charged wrath of the locals regarding her grandfather’s actions. She starts to view the town as her enemy, and defends herself and her grandfather’s memory against their racial hypocrisy.
Shirley Ann Grau was born 8 July 1929 in New Orleans to Adolph Eugene and Katherine (Onions) Grau. Her paternal grandfather came to this country from Prussia before the Civil War; the ancestry on her ...
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In her 1983 Flora Levy Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Shirley Ann Grau commented, "A writer is an evangelist whose preaching is subtle and utterly disguised--of...
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Shirley Ann Grau
