Frances Gray Patton (1906–2000)

Frances Gray Patton, née Lilly, was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her parents were Mary S. McRae, a writer and the first woman to enroll at the University of North Carolina, and Robert Lilly, a newspaper editor. Her brothers also became journalists. She began writing as a child. She attended Trinity College (now Duke University) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she held a playwriting fellowship. She also was active in the Carolina Playmakers theater group and published her first play in the college magazine. After graduation, she married Lewis Patton, an English professor at Duke University, with whom she had three children. In 1945, she published her first short story, "A Piece of Bread," which won a Kenyon Review Prize and was included in the 1945 edition of the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories. Over the next decade, Mrs. Patton published some two dozen stories in The New Yorker magazine, as well as in Harper's, McCalls, The Saturday Review of Literature, and Collier's Weekly. A collection of her stories from the New Yorker were collected into her first book, The Finer Things of Life, published in 1951. Her only novel, Good Morning, Miss Dove, expanded from her short story "The Terrible Miss Dove," was published in 1954 and became a bestseller. It was named a Book of the Month Club selection and adapted into a 1955 Hollywood film and a 1963 stage play. Mrs. Patton published another short story collection in 1959 entitled A Piece of Luck, and a final collection in 1969 called 28 Stories. She taught creative writing courses at both Duke University and the University of North Carolina.