Bailey White

Through her commentaries for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Thomasville writer Bailey White has introduced millions of Americans to an intimate side of Georgia that is hidden from Atlanta-bound flyovers and the hurtling traffic on interstates I-75 and I-95. Yet White has said she does not consider herself a storyteller, but rather a writer who happened to appear on the radio, and it is her written work, which to date comprises two best-selling compilations of stories and a novel, which delivers her readers most fully to White's lifelong home on the Florida line, a half-hour north of Tallahassee.

June Bailey White has lived nearly all her life in Grady County, Georgia, where she was born the youngest daughter of Robb White, a novelist who moved away to Hollywood to write for B-movies and television, and Rosalie Mason, a formidable farmer who reared White and lived out her life with her in a house she built herself (and whose venerable character inhabits many of her daughter's stories). After she graduated from Florida State University in 1973 with an education degree, White taught first graders at Thomasville's E.R. Jerger Elementary School and in her spare time wrote short sketches for magazines like Smithsonian.

In 1990 White corresponded with NPR contributor Daniel Pinkwater about his own children's novels, which she had used in her elementary class, and he encouraged her to submit a tape of her reading some of her stories. Soon after "All Things Considered" first aired White's commentaries-which she delivered in a distinctive quavering voice that many mistook to be that of a quirky elderly commentator-she had become one of the radio network's most popular contributors.

White's radio popularity led to the publication of two collections of her magazine articles and audio essays, and in 1998 she published her first novel, Quite a Year for Plums, a comic tale told through the intertwined lives of characters in a small south Georgia town. A book reviewer for the Washington Post said of White's first collection of writing (1993's Mama Makes Up Her Mind, and Other Dangers of Southern Living), "Like Truman Capote at his finest, White brings an enormous sensitivity to the characters that populate her life."

In her novel and the longer stories contained in her two collections, Mama and Sleeping at the Starlite Motel, and Other Adventures on the Way Back Home (1995), White extends and enriches the south Georgia landscapes that she sketched in five-minute-or-less segments for NPR, depicting her own Thomasville family and neighbors with remarkably deep yet unsentimental sensitivity.

The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope is a writer White often quotes favorably, and thus the writer Henry James' praise for Trollope might as well describe the writing of Bailey White. Trollope's stories, James said, mastered "a complete appreciation of the usual," and they "felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them, felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their gladness, their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and measurable meanings."

As they engage in often comic symbioses with one another, with the weather, and with the inevitable South Georgia flora and wildlife that she describes with deceptive simplicity and crystalline clarity, White's characters often remain in her readers' impressions like so many glistening cobwebs, kudzu vines and porch screens, interwoven with dazzling equanimity in that coastal plain climate where the summertime air is "a combination of heat and damp and green" and "vegetation does not know its place."

Retired from teaching and devoting her time to writing and gardening, White has generally limited her radio contributions to telling Thanksgiving Day stories for NPR's audiences. In 2008, White published a compilation of these, Nothing with Strings: NPR's Beloved Holiday Stories.

White's recognitions include a Fellowship of Southern Writers award for best nonfiction, and in 2005 Mama Makes Up Her Mind was adapted for the theatre by the Stone Mountain ART Station Theater and the book was selected for the Georgia Center for the Book's "Top 25 Reading List" of Georgia literature. White's books have been translated into German and Japanese.