Eugenia Price

Eugenia Price (1916-1996) was an American novelist who spent the first half of her career in Chicago radio, writing and producing programs through the 1940s, before a 1949 religious conversion redirected her toward inspirational writing. A 1961 visit to St. Simons Island, Georgia, changed her career again: a tombstone she found there, for a 19th-century minister named Anson Dodge, sent her into historical research that became The Beloved Invader (1965) and the start of a second, far more successful career as a historical novelist. She relocated permanently to St. Simons in 1965 with her longtime collaborator and companion Joyce Blackburn and remained there for the rest of her life. Price built her reputation on meticulously researched historical fiction grounded in real people and events of coastal Georgia and northern Florida, from the colonial era through the Civil War, telling their stories across four multi-book series -- the St. Simons Trilogy, the Florida Trilogy, the Savannah Quartet, and the Georgia Trilogy -- twelve novels in total, several of them interconnected through the real McQueen and Mackay families whose documented lives she dramatized. She completed one further standalone novel, The Waiting Time, shortly before her death from congestive heart failure in May 1996; it was published posthumously in 1997. All four of her series are complete.