Olive Ann Burns - by John Cochran


Olive Ann Burns was a writer for all of her professional life, but she completed only one book before her death in 1990. That book, Cold Sassy Tree, has become a phenomenon since its publication in 1984, selling over one million copies worldwide and still going strong. As a novel about coming of age in a small Southern town, it has taken its place alongside such American classics as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. It was made into a TV movie in 1989 starring Faye Dunaway and Richard Widmark, and now it has been adapted into an opera by Carlisle Floyd.

Olive Ann Burns was born in Banks County, Georgia on July 17, 1924, on land originally farmed by her great-great-grandfather. She was the youngest of four children. Her father, Arnold Burns, did his best to support the family through farming, but it eventually became a losing proposition, hastened by the Depression. In 1931, the family could no longer afford to remain on the farm. They were forced to rent it out while they moved in with Arnold’s mother in Commerce, Georgia.

It wasn’t until Olive Ann got to high school in Macon, Georgia, where her father was working for a cotton cooperative, that she began to take writing seriously. With encouragement from her ninth grade teacher, she went to work for the school newspaper. Upon graduation from high school, she entered Mercer University in Macon where she edited the campus literary magazine. After her sophomore year, she transferred to the University of North Carolina, where she graduated with a degree in journalism in 1946.

Within a year after graduation, Olive Ann secured a job as a staff writer at the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine, under its founding editor, Angus Perkerson. A remarkable editor with a sure instinct for what people would read, Perkerson had given a young Margaret Mitchell her first job in 1922. Mitchell, of course, went on to write Gone With the Wind. Olive Ann worked as a staff writer on Sunday Magazine until 1957. In 1956, she married one of her fellow staff writers at the magazine, Andy Sparks. They had two children, a daughter born in 1957 and a son born in 1960.

During the early years of her marriage, Olive Ann didn’t write much at all. In 1960, though, she jumped at the chance to work at home as the advice columnist for the Atlanta Journal under the pseudonym “Amy Larkin”. She stayed at this task until 1967, at which time she gave up the column and resumed writing three or four stories a year for the magazine.

In the fall of 1971, Olive Ann’s mother underwent surgery for stomach cancer. Her mother’s illness provided the incentive for Olive Ann to begin a family history. Her mother died in 1972, but Olive Ann completed the project using her father’s recollections of the colorful history of his side of the family. One of her father’s favorite stories was about his Grandpa Power, who remarried soon after his first wife died. When a daughter protested that her mother had been dead for only three weeks, Grandpa Power said, “Gosh a’mighty, she’s dead as she’ll ever be, ain’t she?” Olive Ann always thought that would be a wonderful beginning for a novel, but she never thought she would write it.

Olive Ann’s perspective on writing a novel changed when she herself was diagnosed with cancer in 1975. She knew she would have to find some way to keep her mind off her illness, so she began the writing project which became Cold Sassy Tree. She worked on the novel for eight and one-half years, finishing at the age of sixty. In writing the novel, Olive Ann drew on her father’s recollections of his youth spent in the northeast Georgia community of Commerce, the model for Cold Sassy. Her inspiration for the character of Grandpa Blakeslee (whose name is changed to Lattimore in the opera) came from the stories her father had told her about his Grandpa Power. The narrator of Cold Sassy Tree, Will Tweedy, is based on her father. Although the story is rooted in Burns family history, the characters are fictional

Published in 1984, Cold Sassy Tree became an overnight success. Critics praised it for its richness of emotion, humor and tenderness. Barbara Bush declared it to be one of her favorite books. Oprah Winfrey and B.F. Skinner wrote grateful letters to its author. With success came pressure from her many new fans to write a second novel continuing the story of Will Tweedy. Not long after she began work on a sequel to Cold Sassy Tree, her cancer returned. Olive Ann battled cancer on and off for ten years and spent the last three years of her life confined to bed with congestive heart failure. She died on July 4, 1990. Her unfinished sequel, Leaving Cold Sassy, was published after her death.

Olive Ann once told an interviewer, “It has been said that growing up in the South and becoming a writer is like spending your life riding in a wagon, seated in a chair that is always facing backwards. I don’t face life looking backwards, but I have written about past times and past people. To write Cold Sassy Tree, I interviewed parents, aunts, and old cousins, and I took down what they said in their own words, using the rhythms of their own speech. What I was after was not just names and dates. I wanted stories and details that would bring the dead to life.”

Although Olive Ann Burns’ literary output was limited to two works, her colorful characters, detail-driven use of setting, and humor-laced plots endeared her to readers of all ages. In large part because she was inspired by what she knew best — the idiosyncracies of her own family history — Burns was able to bring a region and an era to life.


NOTE: Olive Ann Burns two books are readily available in paperback.
The sequel to Cold SassyTree, Leaving Cold Sassy includes biographical material. Both are published by Delta Fiction.

The made-for-TV movie, starring Faye Dunaway and Richard Widmark, is available on a video cassette by Turner Home Entertainment.