On Helen Norris Bell

Helen Norris Bell, who died in November 2013, aged ninety-seven, was a distinguished fiction writer who had, in effect, three separate careers so widely separated in time that (though she published a novel in 1940) she was welcomed as a new voice in 1958 and again in 1985. Hiatuses in her writing career were the results of marriage and motherhood, initially, then of a career as a college teacher. It was in the classroom at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, that I came to know her. One of the best teachers I ever had, deeply knowledgeable and inspiring—she more than anyone confirmed me in the belief that being an English professor was a good ambition—she was also endlessly witty. I remember her always with a twinkle in her eye and a wry smile, often stirred by something one of her students had said. She loved the answer one boy gave when she asked him who was meant by a line mentioning “him who walked on water”: “Bear Bryant?”

Nobody at Huntingdon seems to have thought of Helen Bell as a writer, and not just because her books appeared under the name Helen Norris. Susan Snell, one of my fellow students in those days, writes that Helen had removed her two earlier novels from the Huntingdon library and threatened to fail any student who read them.

Only in the 1980s did I learn that the Mrs. Bell, my favorite English professor, had been famous among connoisseurs of good writing for many years. Her first novel appeared in 1940, her second in 1958, and by the end of her career she had published four novels and four collections of short stories; she wrote one-act plays, which won ten awards; her stories won four O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, and two Andrew Lytle Awards. In 2000 she received the Harper Lee Distinguished Writer of the Year Award, a distinction established to recognize lifetime achievement by an Alabama writer. In 1999 she was named Alabama Poet Laureate.

Her first novel, Something More Than Earth, had an impressive launch. A Phi Beta Kappa student at the University of Alabama, Helen was encouraged by Hudson Strode, who taught fiction, to write a novel in lieu of a conventional thesis—reportedly she was the first student in the Southeast to write a creative thesis. Submitted to the Atlantic Monthly’s novel contest, it was the runner-up, was published by Little, Brown, and then publicized at a luncheon featuring Margaret Mitchell.

This auspicious beginning was followed by one of the long interruptions that deprived her career of momentum. She married and gave her attention to her family before turning to fiction again in the 1950s. Her second novel, For the Glory of God, was published by Macmillan in 1958, and during the early to mid-fifties she wrote a play, poetry, and short fiction that brought her Birmingham Festival of Arts awards in 1955, 1956, and 1957. In 1965 she went to Duke University for graduate work, divorced her husband, and then became a full-time professor, teaching at Huntingdon from 1966 through 1979.

Following her retirement she enjoyed the greatest success of her career, primarily as a short story writer, publishing in such quarterlies as the Western Humanities Review and the New England Review and seeing her stories reprinted in the O. Henry anthology and Doubleday’s Prize Stories: 1984.

To an important extent she owed this late flowering to the Sewanee Review and editor George Core. Though she started her third and most successful career phase with two stories in Sun Dog: The Southeast Review and went on to place stories in other literary magazines, in Susan Snell’s words, by “1986 and 1987, George Core, editor of the Sewanee Review, led the competition to acquire Norris’s short fiction, often vying with the Southern Review to publish her stories.” She easily moved from periodical publication to publishing her work between hard covers. In 1985 the University of Illinois press published her collection The Christmas Wife in its Illinois Short Fiction series, and three years later published another collection, Water...