Major Works
- The Secret Pilgrim (1949)
- Night Fire (1946)
- From Hell to Breakfast (1941)
- Many short stories
Biography of William Edward Kimbrough
Kimbrough was born on August 15, 1918, in Meridian, Mississippi. He lived in Meridian during his teenage years, graduating from Meridian High School. He attended George Washington University and then the University of Alabama where he earned both his bachelor’s degree in 1939 and a master’s degree in 1940.
He was a professor at the University of Alabama in the 1940’s. He taught creative writing from 1941 to 1950 and was awarded a Fullbright fellowship in 1950. Kimbrough also taught at the University of Paris and Strasbourg. In 1951, he wrote for the New Orleans Item for a year.
He taught at various universities: University of Michigan, Colorado State University, and Loyola University. He was awarded the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1943 for his first novel, From Hell to Breakfast. The Chicago Tribunes’s Kelsey Guilfoil praised his Night Fire in 1946. Kimbrough was the recipient of a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1944.
Edward Kimbrough died in 1965 in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the age of forty-seven.
Related Websites
- Review of Night Fire on Kirkus
- Chicago Tribune 1946 article: A Significant Novel of South by Kimbrough
Bibliography
- Alabama Authors
- Touring Literary Mississippi, Patti Carr Black and Marion Barnwell
- Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817-1967. James B. Lloyd