Diversify Your Reading Challenge 2022: Young Adult

The selection in this month's Challenge category of "Young Adult" was easy-peasy as the Research Room has precisely the perfect title. It was authored by a native Beaufortonian who has been credited with starting the literary genre! And it also fits as a "50 Shades of Beige" item, too. 

Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones by Ann Head was on school reading lists for 50 years after its original publication. It remains in print and available through major online booksellers.  As her daughter Nancy Head Thode said during a BDC/ Pat Conroy Literary Center presentation on March 27, 2019, "I think having an out of wedlock child is what prompted her to write [it.] It's a story that has some similarity to hers. In the case of Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, two teenagers struggle with an out of wedlock pregnancy." 

Ann Head's real name was  Anne Wales Christensen Head Morse. She came from a prominent Beaufort family. The author's grandmother, Abbie Holmes Christensen, came to Beaufort during the Civil War to teach the recently freed slaves on the Sea Islands. Her father was Niels Christensen, local businessman, land owner and South Carolina State Senator.  Born on October 30, 1915,  Anne grew up in both Beaufort and Boston, Massachusetts. 

Anne wrote her first novel in childhood though she "abandoned [it] when she became more attached to the villain than to the hero."  She married Howard Head of Philadelphia on February 26, 1939 but they divorced in 1944. Their child was the aforementioned and quoted Nancy Head Thode. Her second husband was Dr. Stanley Morse. He was the father of her daughter, Stacey. Head published over 50 short stories in magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, McCalls, Redbook, and Ladies Home Journal. She wrote four internationally published novels and was also Pat Conroy’s first creative writing teacher. 

Here's what that famed author wrote of her in The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes from My Life (2004): "She was the first novelist I'd ever met in the flesh. She looked like a woman who would not tolerate a preposition at the end of a sentence or the anarchy of a dangling participle... She required that my adjectives actually mean something when I landed them into one of my overloaded paragraphs." 

Anne Christensen Head Morse died in Beaufort on May 7, 1968 from a cerebral hemorrhage at age 52. At the time of her death, she was negotiating with a Hollywood studio to turn the book into a movie. A few years later her book was adapted into a "Movie of the Week" starring Desi Arnaz, Jr. and Christopher Norris in 1971. 

The Pat Conroy Literary Center recorded our co-sponsored lecture "Remembering Ann Head: Beaufort's Forgotten Author" presented by Nancy Thode on March 27, 2019.

The BDC Research Room contains copies of her novels, Fair with Rain (1957);  Always in August (1961); Everybody Adored Cara (1963);  and Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones (1967); and a fat vertical file of clippings and some of her magazine articles for our customers to study by appointment. To make the arrangements, call 843-255-6468 or email BDC@bcgov.net.