Mark Morrow · “Photographing Southern Writers”

About This Show

The University of South Carolina Spring Writers Series was an event organized by writer-in-residence William Price Fox and George Geckle, who was the chairperson of the USC English Department at the time. The series that ran between 1979 and 1984 featured more than 37 world-renowned novelists, poets, playwrights, literary critics, and essayists who participated in public readings, met with students, and recorded one-on-one interviews that were broadcast on Columbia’s local public television station, SCETV.

While working on the Southern Writers project, Morrow photographed many of the authors who participated in the USC Spring Writers Series and these portraits are part of this exhibition. Most have never been published, and a good portion of them hung on the walls of the USC English Department for a time.

The participants in the series included James Alan McPherson, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Wolfe, Richard Wilbur, John Gardner, Nora Ephron, Pauline Kael, Joseph Heller, James Dickey, William Price Fox, John Hawkes, John Simon, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, George Garrett, George Plimpton, Stephen Spender, Donald Hall, Czesław Miłosz, John Irving, Doris Betts, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Toby Robertson, Maxine Kumin, Richard Ellmann, Tom Stoppard, Howard Nemerov, Toni Morrison, Garrison Keillor, Erica Jong, Dianne Wakoski, Tim O’Brien, Joseph Brodsky, Galway Kinnell, and Robert Fitzgerald. All these photographs, along with correspondence exchanged between these authors and Morrow, are now archived in the USC Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

Morrow became the “official” photographer for the USC Spring Writers Series and photographed a good portion of these writers for the English Department. This exhibition displays, for the first time, these photographs integrated in chronological order with the portraits Morrow took concurrently of Southern writers for his Images of the Southern Writer book.            

Mark Morrow has worked for a wide range of newspapers, magazines, and other publications as a journalist, photographer, editor, and author. He is a former executive editor at McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.