Annie Greene Nelson
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December 1, 1902
Annie Greene Nelson | |
|---|---|
| Born | Annie Greene December 1, 1902 |
| Died | December 23, 1993 (aged 91) Columbia, South Carolina, U.S. |
| Other names | Annie Plunkett |
| Alma mater | Voorhees College |
| Known for | Writer and playwright |
Annie Greene Nelson (December 1, 1902 – December 23, 1993) was a writer and playwright. She was the first African American woman in South Carolina to publish a novel.[1][2]
Annie Greene was born at the Parrott Plantation in Darlington County, South Carolina, on December 5, 1902, to Sylvester and Nancy Greene (née Muldow).[1][3][4][2] She was the eldest child of thirteen or fourteen children.[1][5] Sylvester Greene was a sharecropper and a music teacher.[2] Nelson recalled that she began reciting poetry at two years old and published a poem in a local paper as a child.[4]
Nelson began school on the Parrots' Plantation.[1] She later attended boarding school at Benedict College and earned a degree in education and nursing from Voorhees College in 1923.[1][5] While at Voorhees, she learned about and was inspired by Elizabeth Evelyn Wright.[6]
Writing career
In 1925, Nelson first published a poem, "What Do You Think of Mother", in the Palmetto Leader. She later wrote three novels, After the Storm (1942), The Dawn Appears (1944), and Don't Walk on My Dreams (1961).[1] A novel, Shadow of Southland, was serialized in 1952 in a Columbia newspaper, but was never issued as a book.[3] In 1976, she wrote an unpublished autobiography, To Paw with Love.[7] Nelson wrote two plays, Weary Fireside Blues, which was produced off-Broadway, and The Parrots' Plantation, which was staged at Brooklyn College.[1][5]
Just prior to her death, Nelson worked on a manuscript called Eighty, So What?[1]
Nelson sets her works in Pee Dee, South Carolina, recounting life for ordinary African Americans in her community.[1][4] Her work differs from that by other Black writers of the 1940s and 1950s as her fiction imagines a landscape "where blacks and whites live together in harmony."[8] She discusses the civil rights movement in Don't Walk on My Dreams and about violence by Whites against Blacks in her autobiography.[4]
Later life and death
At age 80, Nelson took courses in drama at the University of South Carolina to help her act for her one-woman show, Happenings on the Parrot Plantation.[2][1]
Nelson died in Columbia, South Carolina, on December 23, 1993.[1]
