Berry Morgan—does anyone in the reading community recognize that name? But though now nearly lost to the world of letters, she once conducted a flourishing career. In 1966 Houghton Mifflin published her novel, Pursuit, and awarded her a Literary Fellowship for it. Walker Percy called her “the most exciting novelist to come out of the South since Flannery O’Connor.”

During the next two decades Morgan published twenty-five stories in the New Yorker. Many appeared in her 1974 collection, The Mystic Adventures of Roxie Stoner. After Robert Gottlieb replaced William Shawn as editor of the New Yorker, in 1987, Morgan’s work ceased to appear in that magazine—or anywhere else, for that matter. She died in 2002, in a nursing home, still writing.

Photo: Jon Sachs

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