Will D. Campbell (b. 1924)
Biography
Will Davis Campbell was born on July 18, 1924, in the small town of
Liberty, Mississippi, a town name fitting to Campbell's lifelong pursuit
of working for the freedom of all people. Well-educated--A.B. from
Wake Forest College and his B.D. from Yale--and sympathetic to the Civil
Rights activists, Campbell worked as a Baptist preacher in Louisiana for
two years before he was awarded the position of Director of Religious Life
at the University of Mississippi. After only two years there, he
was forced to leave the university because of his Civil Rights participation.
He served on the National Council of Churches in New York as a race relation
consultant and worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis,
and Andrew Young to gain knowledge of race relations. Today he lives
and preaches in Wilson, Tennessee, while striving for spiritual and racial
harmony.
Will D. Campbell's Brother to a Dragonfly (1977) earned him the
Lillian Smith Prize, the Christopher Award, and a National Book Award nomination.
Another of his novels, The Glad River (1982), won a first-place
award from the Friends of American Writers in 1982. He has also won
the Lyndhurst Prize and an Alex Haley Award.
Bibliography
Fiction
- The Glad River (1982)
- Cecelia's Sin: A Novella (1983)
- Shugah and Doops (Father Thyme) (1998)
Non-Fiction
- Race and the Renewal of the Church (1962)
- We are a Third Race (1962)
- Up to Our Steeples in Politics (with James Y. Holloway, 1970)
- The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern Churchmen (editor, with James
Y. Holloway, 1972)
- "And the Criminals with Him . . ." Lk 23:33: A First-Person Book About Prisons
(editor, with James Y. Holloway, 1973)
- Callilngs! (editor, with James Y. Holloway, 1974)
- Brother to a Dragonfly (1977)
- An Oral History with Will Davis Campbell, Christian Preacher (interview
with Orley B. Caudill, 1980)
- God on Earth: The Lord's Prayer for Our Time (1983)
- Forty Acres and a Goat: A Memoir (1986)
- The Convention: A Parable (1988)
- Covenant: Faces, Voices, Places (with photographs by Al Clayton, 1989)
- Providence (1992)
- The Stem of Jessie: The Costs of Community at a 1960s Southern School (1995)
- And Also With You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma (1997)
- Soul Among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher (1999)
- A Life Is More than a Moment: The Desegregation of Little Rock's Central
High (by Wilmer Counts, Campbell contributed essays, 1999)
- A Black Politician's Journey to the House: Robert G. Clark's Story (2003)
Young Adult
- Chester and Chun Ling (1989)
- The Pear Tree That Bloomed in the Fall (1996)
Sources and Links
-Return to Browsing-