It’s the 90th birthday of Southern author Shirley Ann Grau (b. 1929, #nicelonglife), whose novel The Keepers of the House (1964) won a Pulitzer and prompted the KKK to burn a cross on her lawn.

Grau was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, but grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, after her family moved there in the 1930s. She attended a school that taught her Latin, literature, and “how to set a table if I happened to be giving a dinner for the pope.” Her family moved back to New Orleans when Grau was a senior in high school, and in 1950 she received her B.A. in English at Newcomb College, the coordinate women’s college at Tulane University, and then started graduate school at Tulane—but upon asking for a teaching assistantship was told by the army major who headed the department that “There will be no females in the English department.” (I agree. Women should stick to the hard sciences where they belong.)

In 1955, Grau published her first book, The Black Prince, and Other Stories, which was critically acclaimed and did very well, and also married James Kern Fiebleman, a Tulane philosophy professor with whom she would have four children; their lives together were “ordinary and contented,” and they wintered in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, and summered in Martha’s Vineyard. Grau spoke in an interview about balancing motherhood and writing and said that “the pediatrician’s examining table is a perfect place to do galleys…”

Grau’s first novel was The Hard Blue Sky (1958), followed by The House on Coliseum Street (1961), the story of a young woman who gets an abortion; the novel was honored at the Louisiana Book Festival in 2013 and has been garnering new interest. The Keepers of the House addresses race, class, and gender through several generations of the Howland family. When Grau got the call announcing that she’d won the Pulitzer, she was exhausted from being up with a child all night and thought it was a friend pranking her. She said, “Yeah, and I’m the Queen of England too,” and hung up. She was later embarrassed to learn that she really had won.

Have a sunny Monday full of fickle Baltimore Orioles and stay scrupulously honest to the data.