Blanche Colton Williams

Blanche Colton Williams (February 10, 1879 – August 9, 1944) was an American author, editor, department head and professor of English literature, and pioneer in women’s higher education. She was known for her “groundbreaking work on structure and analysis of the short story” and is credited with having done more for the short story genre than anyone in her lifetime. An 1898 graduate of Industrial Institute and College in Columbus, Mississippi, the first public women’s university in the United States, Williams went on to a three-decade career at Hunter College, a women’s college in New York City.

Life and education Early life Blanche Gertrude Williams was born February 10, 1879, in Kosciusko, Mississippi, the first of four children to Millard Fillmore "Peter" Williams (1852–1900) and Mary Ella Colton Williams (1859–1928). Her siblings include Wirt Alfred Williams (born 1882), Sidney Colton Williams (born 1885), and Lulu Upton Williams (born 1893).

Her father worked as a schoolteacher and, unusual for his time and place, admired Abraham Lincoln and believed that slavery was wrong. He spent much of his time teaching and reading, while his wife pursued the hard work of the family farm in order to protect his delicate health (he later died of tuberculosis). Williams inherited her father’s “love of learning and democratic ideas” and her mother’s “determination, common sense, and tolerance.” In addition to the 3,000 students she taught at Columbia and Hunter, she reached thousands more through books she wrote on crafting short stories. Her 1917 work, Handbook on Short Story Writing, has been described as “the first practical aid to growing young writers that was put on the market in this country.” She later wrote three additional books that transformed the short study medium: Our Short Story Writers (1925), Studying the Short Story (1926), and Short Story Writing (1930).

Writing and editing O’Henry Prize and short stories In 1919, Williams accepted the chair of the O’Henry Memorial Awards Committee and served as its chair until 1932. For fifteen years she edited the O’Henry Award short story volumes. As chair of the committee, she evaluated sixty thousand submissions during her service and was heralded by her editorial colleagues for possessing a “sharp eye for a superior story.”

Biographies Williams spent much of the last decade of her life writing not the short stories for which her name had become so widely attached, but instead biographies. She traveled to England to research George Eliot, living in the towns and even the houses where the author lived.

The international success of George Eliot in 1936 prompted Williams to continue her biographical research. Her 1941 biography, Clara Barton, Daughter of Destiny, explored hundreds of unpublished letters. Its release coincided with a great Red Cross drive and parade in New York City with many stores featuring the book at the center of elaborate displays.

Death and legacy alt=Williams (right) is presented birthday present by student president at her alma mater (1941). Williams (right) is presented birthday present by student president at her alma mater.(1941).

Death In 1943, Williams traveled to Mississippi to visit family and to conduct a series of lectures at her alma mater and never returned to New York. In the spring of the following year, suffering from cancer, she moved in with family members and died on August 9, 1944, in Jackson, MS. Her ashes were interred at the foot of her parents’ graves in Kosciusko. Newspapers throughout New York City, as well as national periodicals, including Time Magazine, memorialized Williams upon her death. The literary contest became essential to the promotion of the Harlem Renaissance's writers and artists. The May 1925 issue of Opportunity lists a number of prizewinners who went on to enjoy successful publishing careers: Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, and Franklin Frazier.

Williams later recommended prize-winning contest stories to the O’Henry Prize Committee, including John Matheus’s "Fog" (which won first prize in the Short Story division), Arthur Huff Fauset’s “Symphonesque,” and Eugene Gordon’s “Rootbound.” She later met Dorothy West at the Opportunity contest banquet and became an important champion and mentor of the young author’s work. West’s contest submission was recommended by Williams to the committee, and later her short story, “An Important Man,” was recommended for publication in Columbia University’s literary magazine.

Collections A collection of over 1000 short story anthologies, first editions, and annotated volumes donated by Williams resides at the Fant Memorial Library at her alma mater, now named Mississippi University for Women. The collection includes “her short story collection, one of the most complete in the world … as are 22 volumes on Keats, first editions of George Eliot’s novels, and rare editions of Edgar Allan Poe.” The collection also contains her “prized possession,” a crayon portrait of Eliot by Samuel Laurence (1860).

Williams also donated over 600 volumes to Delta State Teachers College, where her brother Wirt A. Williams served as department head of social sciences.

Selected list of works

Original works

Edited works O. Henry Memorial Prize Winning Stories. Doubleday. Annually, 1919 – 1934.