Eva Rutland

Eva Rutland (January 15, 1917 – March 12, 2012) was an author of more than 20 romance novels. She was the author When We Were Colored: A Mother’s Story and, No Crystal Stair and is the winner of the 2000 Golden Pen Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Early life and education

Born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1917, Rutland was the granddaughter of a former slave who sent all of his children through college. Rutland's mother was a school teacher; her father a pharmacist.

She attended segregated schools her entire life and graduated from Spelman College in 1937.

Author Eva Rutland published her first memoir in 1964 (The Trouble With Being Mama: A Negro Mother on the Anxieties and Joys of Bringing Up a Family). The book, updated and republished in 2007 as When We Were Colored: A Mother’s Story, chronicles the lives of an ordinary yet extraordinary "colored" family as they move from segregation to integration during the turbulent civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s.

In the 1950s, Rutland realized that she was going blind. "When you get incapacitated, and you can't see or can't move around as you should, then you're kind of at a loss," she says. "So you have to find something to do, and I think that's when I found my writing." Rutland already sold writing to Redbook and other magazines. In 1964, she published a family memoir as a kind of antidote to the public fear about change and race — issues she was intimately familiar with as her own children attended newly integrated schools. In the book, The Trouble With Being a Mama, she wrote, "Integration in theory is a fine, high-sounding utopia. In reality, I shivered as I watched my children unknowingly shed the warm cloak of segregation."

No Crystal Stair, Eva Rutland's first mainstream novel, chronicles six decades of American history through the experiences of Ann Elizabeth Carter Metcalf and her family. Rutland's semiautobiographical novel takes its title from a stanza in Langston Hughes' 1922 poem "Mother to Son." Both the poem and the novel carry messages of hope and perseverance in the face of life's disappointments. The book is a departure from Rutland's earlier works. The author, who occasionally includes African-American characters in her novels, has taken a frank, head-on look at racism. In addition, her use of language may surprise many familiar with her work.

Personal life She married Bill Rutland, a civilian with the Tuskegee Airmen. The Air Force moved Bill Rutland to Ohio, then Sacramento, California. He and Eva built a home, made new friends and raised four children.

Rutland died in Sacramento, California, on March 12, 2012, at the age of 95.

Awards and honors Winner of the 2000 Golden Pen Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Selected works Romance novels To Love Them All – March 1988, Harlequin Romance #2897 At First Sight – November 1988, Harlequin Romance #2944 Matched Pair – May 1989, Harlequin Regency Romance #1 Vicar's Daughter, The – February 1990, Harlequin Regency Romance #20 Enterprising Lady – June 1990, Harlequin Regency Romance #28 No Accounting For Love – July 1990, Harlequin Romance #3064 Willful Lady, The – March 1991, Harlequin Regency Romance #45 and June 2001, Mills and Boon Historical Romance Always Christmas – December 1992, Harlequin Romance #3240 Gretna Bride – January 1993, Harlequin Regency Romance #89 Foreign Affair – October 1993, Harlequin Romance #3283 Private Dancer – June 1996, Harlequin Romance #3412 Marriage Bait – January 1997, Harlequin Romance #3439 Child's Christmas, A – December 1997, Harlequin Superromance #769 Wedding Trap, The – January 1998, Harlequin Romance #3490 Million-Dollar Marriage, The – August 1998, Harlequin Romance #3518 Her Own Prince Charming – April 1999, Harlequin Romance #3550 Almost A Wife – September 2000, Harlequin Romance #3621 Heart And Soul – February 2005, Harlequin Superromance #1255

Memoirs The Trouble With Being a Mama: A Negro Mother on the Anxieties and Joys of Bringing Up a Family- 1964 When We Were Colored: A Mother’s Story - May 2007

Other fiction No Crystal Stair - February 2000