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Mary Ward Brown
Biography
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Judson College — For Women Who Seek Success. This is an important slogan for Judson College students. Widespread success found one Judson graduate years after she walked beneath the dome.
Mary Ward graduated from Judson in the centennial class of 1938 with a degree in English. Upon graduation she took a job as a publicity director for Judson College. She had little idea where this job would take her. Through a public relations conference she met Kirtley Brown, publicity director for Auburn University. Brown was the son of a Judson graduate who named him after one of Judson’s founders, Anne Kirtley.
They met in April, 1939, and within two months married. Shortly after, they moved into Mrs. Brown’s childhood home in Hamburg. Her father, Thomas Ward, willed her the two-story white house upon his death.
In the late 1950’s she published her first short stories. But the stress of writing, along with being a housewife and mother, was too much at the time. So, she gave up writing.
Responsibilities of the farm and family filled the years. Her husband Kirtley died and her son, Kirtley Jr., grew up. Mrs. Brown began writing again. Twenty-five years passed between publications. But after her first publication she become obsessed with writing, and her second attempt at writing was more fruitful. McCall’s magazine published “Amaryllis” in 1978 and other short stories soon followed.
She compiled a book of short stories over the next ten years and published them in Tongues of Flame. She wrote from what she knew — the South. This won her the 1987 PEN Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first fiction. Other awards followed, and she was published in the 1983 and 1984 compilations of Best in American Short Stories.
Today she still lives in Hamburg writing short stories in the old white plantation house her father built. Her's is a simple life, and that’s the way she likes it.
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