Should Living Be Enough ‘Lived Experience’ for a Writer?

This summer, 37 years late, I finally got to Allan Gurganus’s magnificent novel “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.” It was a best seller in 1989. But today, Gurganus would probably have trouble finding a publisher for it. You see, Gurganus is a white man and the main character is a woman. And then, let’s not even consider that some of the characters he gets into the heads of are … Black.

I was blown away by how fully Gurganus embodied a woman who marries a middle-aged Confederate veteran in her teens at the turn of the 20th century and lives into her 90s to tell her story to a young aide at her nursing home.........

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