The Girls of August by Anne Rivers Siddons

Siddons’s other books include a horror story set in Atlanta, The House Next Door (1978), which Stephen King compared to The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

She had four stepsons: Lee, Kemble, Rick, and David. In 1966 she married author and advertising executive Heyward Siddons. After college Siddons worked as a writer and editor at Atlanta magazine with its founder, Jim Townsend. An editorial she wrote favoring integration was recognized nationally but criticized by the school administration, and a second, similar editorial led to her dismissal from the newspaper. At Auburn she worked as a writer for the college newspaper. Her education at Auburn University from 1954 to 1958, where she earned a bachelor’s degree, became the inspiration for her first novel, Heartbreak Hotel (1976), which subsequently became the film Heart of Dixie in 1989.

She was the daughter of Marvin Rivers, a lawyer, and Katherine, a secretary at Campbell High School. Siddons was born Sybil Anne Rivers on January 9, 1936, in Atlanta and reared in Fairburn. Her novel Downtown (1994) recreates her early career as a writer and editor for Atlanta magazine, and her most commercially successful book, Peachtree Road (1989), portrays modern Atlanta’s white elite on the eve of the civil rights era. She was also the author of two books of nonfiction, Go Straight on Peachtree (1978), a McDonald City Guide to Atlanta, and John Chancellor Makes Me Cry (1975), a series of essays patterned around the changing seasons in Atlanta. Two novels, Homeplace (1987) and Nora, Nora (2000), take place in a fictionalized version of Fairburn, her hometown, in Fulton County. Though all of her twenty books are set in Georgia or concern southerners living elsewhere, Anne Rivers Siddons was best known for books about Atlanta and its environs.

The Girls of August by Anne Rivers Siddons