Martha Strudwick Young
| Martha Strudwick Young | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Eli Shepperd January 11, 1862 Newbern, Alabama |
| Died | May 9, 1941 (aged 79) Greensboro, Alabama |
| Occupation | writer |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Livingston Female Academy and State Normal School |
| Relatives | Julia Strudwick Tutwiler (aunt) |
Martha Strudwick Young (Jan. 11, 1862–May 9, 1941) was an American regionalist writer known for her recounting of Southern folk tales, fables, and songs of black life in the plantation era. She was admired by other writers for her skill with dialect. Young was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1986.
Martha Strudwick Young was the daughter of Confederate physician and surgeon Elisha Young and Anne Eliza Ashe (Tutwiler) Young. The women's education and prison reform advocate Julia Strudwick Tutwiler was her aunt. Her family moved to nearby Greensboro after the Civil War, and it was there that she learned the Southern folk tales and stories of African-American culture that would form the basis of her later writings.
Young was educated at the Green Springs School (which had been founded by her grandfather Henry Tutwiler as a school for boys), the Greensboro Female Academy, and the Tuscaloosa Female Academy before graduating from the Livingston Female Academy and State Normal School (later to become Livingston University and then the University of West Alabama). One of her teachers at the Greensboro Female Academy was the writer Louise Clarke Pyrnelle.
Young wrote eight books, mainly collections of Southern folk tales, fables, stories, and songs, many of which drew on black culture and featured black protagonists. She was one of a group of regional writers who helped to popularize the use of dialect as an adjunct to realism, including George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Mary Noailles Murfree, and Joel Chandler Harris. Young, who aimed to preserve the tales and songs she had known as a child, has been called "Alabama's foremost folklorist."
She began publishing in 1884 under the pseudonym 'Eli Shepperd' with a story in the New Orleans Times-Democrat. For more than 50 years she continued to publish stories as well as sentimental and religious poems in regional and national magazines and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, Women's Home Companion, Metropolitan Magazine, Southern Bivouac, Detroit Free Press, and Southern Churchman.
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