Some Books (At Least Partially) Set in Beaufort District

The Library system's marketing calendar for March 2026 gives the "Book Highlight: 'Books Set in South Carolina.'" As with most library marketing calendar bullet points, we interpret "Books Set in South Carolina" in ways that comply with the BDC's mission and geographical imperative. Thus, this post will highlight some of the BDC fiction titles which are set in Beaufort, Hampton or Jasper Counties.   

What are the criteria used for adding works of fiction to the BDC? The most important one is whether or not the title meets the spirit of the BDC's collection development policy which is a section within the Library's collection development policy. Two key points about the BDC's collection development policy: 1) We do not put works of fiction into the non-fiction Local History sections at the branch libraries. 2) We focus our time and budget on acquiring non-fiction materials. That said, one's odds for having one's novel accepted into the BDC's permanent special collection are increased when: 

• The author was born or reared in Beaufort County AND
• The novel is set or partially set within areas of the former Beaufort District AND
• The work of fiction helps build the literary history of Beaufort District

Works of fiction authored by long-time residents - which I define as an author living in Beaufort County for 10 or more years - are sometimes included. Reviews, in the professional literature or from fellow librarians, are taken into consideration as well. 

On the whole, self-published materials have less of a chance of being added, but the fact that the novel was self-published does not exclude a novel from selection. A prime example of a self-published to press published author is Hilton Head's Kathryn Wall. She moved to the island in 1994. She self-published her first book In for a Penny in 2001.

On Facebook later this month, Sydney has a post about In for a Penny that says:

[The book] will transport you straight into the Lowcountry with vivid imagery of the salt air, dunes, and palmetto trees. But more importantly, it will keep you on the edge of your seat. Taking place a year after Bay Tanner’s husband was murdered, she has been successful in isolating herself in their hideaway home on Hilton Head. Except, are you ever really alone when you have anger and fear weighing on you? When the news of another murder comes knocking on her door, Tanner realizes some seemly separate puzzles may actually piece together...

Wall's second Bay Tanner book was published by a regional press. The rest of her Bay Tanner series have been published by St. Martin's Press. 

Occasionally I add children's fiction books to the BDC. For example, I bought copies of The Mermaid of Hilton Head: A Christmas Coral written and illustrated by Nina Leipold as a record of a locally based press, Starbook Publications, and Crosby by Dennis Haseley on account of native son Jonathan Green's illustrations.

In other words, each item in the BDC's Fiction section is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, subject to my extensive training as a librarian (M.L. 1982; S.L. 1992), my extensive knowledge of what's already in the collection, and years of experience helping researchers inside the BDC. 

In some ways the celebrity that was and remains Pat Conroy tends to overpower the contributions of other fine (and native born) Beaufort County authors. A case in point is Valerie Sayers. She was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Valerie Sayers is the author of a collection of stories, The Age of Infidelity, and six novels. Who Do You Love and Brain Fever were both named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year, and a film, "Due East," was based on her novels Due East and How I Got Him Back.  Sayers’s stories, essays, and reviews have appeared widely, in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Commonweal, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Image, Witness, and Prairie Schooner, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.  Her literary prizes include a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes for fiction. She has been honored with the Kaneb, Sheedy, and Joyce Awards for Excellence in Teaching at UND. Her body of work was recognized by the Governor's Award for the Humanities in 2025. 

Ann Head was the pen name of Anne Wales Christensen Head Morse. Anne came from a Beaufort family known for breaking tradition.  Ann’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, landowner and South Carolina State Senator.  Born on October 30, 1915, Anne grew up in both Beaufort and Boston, Massachusetts.  Head published dozens of short stories, 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. 

Her Mr. & Mrs. Bo Jo Jones  was on many a school's reading lists for more than a half century. At the time of her death in 1968, 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. Ann Head was inducted into the South Carolina's Literary Hall of Fame by the state's Academy of Authors in 2024. The BDC Research Room contains copies of each of her novels, an original short story "Everybody Else's Mother," and a vertical file of newspaper and magazine articles by and about the author.

The most famous of the books set in Beaufort (at least until Pat Conroy's time) was A Sea Island Lady by Francis Griswold (1939). It is a sweeping antebellum-to-the-1920s historical novel based on some of the key people and events in Beaufort's past. It's been my experience that a reader either loves it or hates it. I think - as did many of its contemporary reviewers when the book was first published - that it was way too long for its own good. This is not to say that I don't recommend that others read it. Indeed, the parts about the effect of the Great Sea Island Hurricane and phosphate mining bear obvious signs of diligent historical research. However, I would recommend that one reads A Sea Island Lady in conjunction with Dr. Rowland's and Dr. Wise's volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Beaufort County South Carolina to help separate the fiction from the facts.

Most of the novels in the BDC were either already in the catalog when I first came to work in February 1999 or have been gifts from the author or gifts from the Friends of the Beaufort Library who give me first dibs on their donations relating to local history and local authors. We are up to approximately 17 linear feet of novels, about 3% of the total published format holdings in the special library part of the BDC. 

Here are just a few of the novels in our holdings that are set in Beaufort District: 

Always in August was Ann Head’s second published novel.  It was set in the Lowcountry, on the Coosaw Sound and captures the excitement and drama of the Old South, but in a 1960’s setting.  The violence and passion that play out in the novel always occurred in the hot, humid month of August, a month that is also known for hurricanes—which bring about erupted emotions, tragedy and misfortune in their wake. 

The Ballad of Witches Hill by Jeanne Gosselin Arnold (1988) is a fantasy. The Red Witch of War, Septet Legair has 7 heads representing the 7 deadly sins. Her goal is to destroy the peaceful Frogmorians. It is a battle fought to the death between the evil Haints and the good Saints. The tale told in verse for young adults was penned by a former Albany (NY) Times-Union newspaper reporter and editor who retired to St. Helena Island.

The Battle of Fort Scarlet: A Strange, Compelling Story in a Forgotten War by Jon Bebbington (2023) is a fictional alternate history title that tells the story of an artillery fortification and the men who were tasked with protecting the Parris Island naval installation. These sailors and marines never anticipated that they would face any battle until the Spanish Navy invades Port Royal Sound during the Spanish American War - BTW which never happened in actual fact. 

Beaufort 1849: A Novel of Antebellum South Carolina by Karen Lynn Allen (2011) is a story about transformation. After years of avoidance, Jasper Wainwright returns to his hometown, Beaufort, South Carolina. He dreams of the day when enslaved people will be freed and transition to earning wages for their labor. He believes this to be a lost cause, until the Charleston Courier begins publishing anonymous letters that begin to give him hope. While seeing the need for change in everyone around him, Jasper is forced to confront his own need for change in his personal and love life. 

Bed & Breakfast by Lois Battle (1996) is set in a Beaufort inn during the Christmas holidays. Rumor has it that the protagonist, Josie Taternall, was modeled upon a former Beaufort County Library Board member, Becky Trask. Battle was a New York Times best-selling author of seven novels who chose Beaufort as her forever home. She was known as the “Queen of Grand Entrances” by her friends and was recognized as a local champion of the arts. BTW: The BDC has several Lois Battle scrapbooks as well as her marked up manuscript of Bed & Breakfast in our archives.  

Black Gauntlet by Mary Howard Schoolcraft (1860) defends the institution of slavery. 

She paid Lippincott $741.69 to publish 1500 copies spread over four small printings. In other words, she was a 19th century self-published author. Brian W. Dippie wrote that Schoolcraft's goal was not profit, but to publish a public panegyric to herself: 

The Black Gauntlet was a shapeless, grotesquely self-indulgent exercise in conceit; it had no plot, no point, no characters. But it had a heroine, Mary Schoolcraft disguised as Musidora, and it had a cast of knaves and fools as counterpoint to her virtues. 

Nevertheless, her book has a place in the literary history of Beaufort District as one written and published by a Southern apologist.

Catherine's Cross by Millie West (2013) is a novel about a suspicious death being investigated by a Beaufort County detective with a little hoodoo thrown into the plot. 

Change Gonna Come by Cheryl Miles (2025) follows a young, orphaned, Gullah enslaved woman navigating the war-torn Sea Islands during the Civil War. Lucy is determined to create her own future while also answering questions of her past, most notably: Who was her mother and where did she go? 

Dead Low Water by Roger Pinckney (2019) is based on real events. Pinckney uses the facsimile Harbour Town lighthouse as a metaphor for what lurks beneath the surface of human relationships and politics. When the owners of the Harbour Town marina turn up missing, two cops go rogue trying to find them and uncover a vast and seething criminal conspiracy, embezzlement, smuggling and murder. It is a sordid tale unraveled by law enforcement personnel who know the seedy side of life in a resort town.

Driftwood Unmasked: The Legend and the Man by Gibbes McDowell (2018) is based on the life of a local legend, Hugh Cory. Driftwood was a ramblin’ man, an Irishman who immigrated to the US in some unknown year for unknown reasons, who eventually landed on a small plot of sand on Harbor Island for who-knows why. He made quite a reputation for himself as an artist and storyteller before rambling on again, but he left quite the legacy (and a million unanswered questions) in his wake.

McDowell’s novel portrays Driftwood as a veteran suffering from PTSD, a drifter in search of somewhere to settle, a lover, a threat to established order, and the lucky discoverer of pirate gold. Later, when McDowell endeavored to find real answers to his questions about the mysterious Cory, he found that his fictional portrayal was not too far-off from the truth in some instances.

Famous All Over Town by Bernie Schein (2014) is comically candid multigenerational account of two Jews, a Lowcountry native and a northern transplant, at the epicenter of momentous events in the sleepy Southern coastal hamlet of Somerset, a fictitious stand-in for Schein's native Beaufort, South Carolina. A photograph from our Lucille Hasell Culp Collection is on the book cover.

Fragments of the Ark by Louise Meriwether (1994) was inspired by the life of Robert Smalls. Peter Mango, a runaway slave, saves his family and fellow escapees by commandeering a Confederate gunboat and delivering it to the Union Army stationed in Beaufort, South Carolina. The story follows Mango throughout his life, taking the reader through the perspective of a Black man living through the Civil War. This story is full of gut-wrenching realizations but also love and perseverance as Mango endeavors his expedition to freedom.

Gwine Home: A Gullah/Geechee Saga by Marquetta Goodwine (2019) takes the readers into a Gullah/Geechee intergenerational saga centered on their spirituality and healing practices. The Gullah/Geechee history of the family is passed down from the elders to the youths as each day on the Sea Islands unfolds when the youths realize that there are changes happening to the environment that threaten the land the family has held for generations. Goodwine describes herself as an artivist (an artist-activist) and is the Queen of the Gullah/Geechee nation. 

Hilton Head by Josephine Pinckney (1941) captures the essence of the frontier environment that South Carolina's first English settler, Dr. Henry Woodward, found himself in during the mid-17th century. Numerous small tribes of Native Americans were roaming the area, the Spanish had claims to Carolina and missionary settlements to back up those claims, and the English appeared unprepared to meet the challenges. Hilton Head makes a very satisfying read because Pinckney is a deft creator of characterization. Dr. Woodward is shown to be part master negotiator, part political bungler, part capitalist, and something of a religious chameleon. 

Home Guard: A Novel of the Civil War by John Warley (2019) is a coming-of-age story set in Beaufort during the Union occupation. Local resident John Warley is the author of seven works of fiction and has deep ties to Beaufort as a descendant of John Barnwell. He is the immediate past-president of the Beaufort History Museum. 

Hurricane Sisters: Tales of Low Country Ladies by J. C. Fewell (2012) is a collection of fictionalized short stories that follow a sisterhood of women, along with their families and other acquaintances, as they deal with life’s storms (metaphorical and physical) in Beaufort from 1959 to 2017. Nearly all of the “Big Ones” (i.e. hurricanes) that the old-timers love to talk about make an appearance in this anthology, either explicitly or as the background for other events.

Katrina: Woman of Beaufort by Rita Van Pelt (1994) depicts the struggles women faced in the time before, during, and after the Civil War. A young woman named Katrina is brought to Beaufort aboard the Sea Belle by her father; her mother sadly passed during the voyage. Though she is a fictional character, the people and places she meets and visits are historically accurate. The racist and sexist prejudices she faces in Beaufort are also historically accurate. Katrina is forced to navigate this new life and find the strength to transcend it.

 
Kedzie: Saint Helena Island Slave by Bonnie Stanard (2011) follows a young, enslaved girl whose life is turned upside down as she is forced to face adversity alone.

  

Left by the Side of the Road: Characters without a Novel by Carolyn Schriber (2012) offers reasons why hundreds of real people with whom Laura M. Towne came in contact during the early years of the Port Royal Experiment do not appear in The Road to Frogmore or Beyond All Price, her works of local historical fiction. The tipping point for Schriber was "Did this person help or hinder Towne in a significant way?" and in many cases, important people in other spheres, such as Robert Smalls, did not. The vignettes offered here, although written as historical fiction, flesh out real people in Beaufort District during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. 

Lowcountry Boil (2003) by Carl T. Smith also found inspiration from local events involving a notorious drug trafficking case of the early 1980s code named Operation Jackpot. In Smith's novel Sam Larkin and an undercover federal agent face an entrenched society willing to look the other way when crime pays and a group of high-profile conspirators ready to kill to make sure it does. We have a vertical file about Operation Jackpot. For the real scoop, we recommend the non-fiction book Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, and the Sting that Launched the War on Drugs by Jason Ryan (2011). (If you want recipes for lowcountry boil or to learn about the dish's history, we have you covered as well.) 

Maid of the Combahee: A Romance of the South from the Manuscript of Sir Thomas Yeld, Bart. by Israel Plummer Taft (1918) is written so compellingly of the American Revolution as it unfolded in Beaufort District that I was intrigued by the mystery of his connection to this place. As it turns out, though Taft was born in California in 1857, his father, Henry Spurr Taft, was a Colonel in the Federal Signal Corps who was stationed at Port Royal during the Civil War. Afterwards Col. Taft bought property on St. Helena Island and planted cotton for a few years into the Reconstruction period - which is how young Israel Plummer Taft knew the area so well. I discovered that this is a very rare survivor of the Saulsbury Publishing Company of Baltimore, MD. Ours is a bit fragile so I recommend reading the digital copy on HathiTrust. 

Malachi by Scott Graber (2009) is a novel wherein a young, transplanted lawyer discovers that the rural life of growing tomatoes and harvesting shrimp is being overcome by the desire of land developers to lure well-heeled Yankee retirees. He is happy with his genteel life until he discovers a secret about his law firm and about himself--a secret that will change his perceptions. Graber is a local attorney. 

Minnow by James McTeer (2015) won the South Carolina First Novel Prize. McTeer draws upon his deep lowcountry roots as grandson of the High Sheriff of the Lowcountry. Reviews were great: 

Minnow is an urgent novel, as stark and wild as the fairy tale deep in its bones. James McTeer writes with a white magic all his own; Minnow, the small brave boy he has summoned from a handful of grave-dust and a hurricane, will live with me for a long time to come. —Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton

I predict James McTeer's Minnow will become as estimable a part of the Lowcountry as the Hoodoo magic, ghosts and spirits, the haunted Gullah-geechies, Sweetgrass baskets, the Old Sheldon Church Ruins, and the art of Jonathan Greene. A fabulous tale. —Pat Conroy

Moringa: Tree of Life Book 2 Cat Gabbiano Mystery series by Donna Keel Armer (2024) is a fictional story that takes place in the Lowcountry of South Carolina by a resident local author. We also have a copy of the book 1 in the series, The Red Fish.  

Red Bird and the Devil a novel by Robert Lanham also focuses on Dr. Woodward. The title is drawn from an extract of a letter that Henry Woodward wrote to John Locke dated 12 November 1675 in which Woodward shares some of the Native American's beliefs. "Port Royall Indians worship the Sun but the Westos worship the Devil and have his figure carved in wood." He shared that some Indians purport to "have power over the ratle snakes soe farr as to send one over severall over rivers and brooks to bite a particular Indian which has bin don since our being here."

 

The Sea Island’s Secret: A Delta and Jax Mystery by Susan Diamond Riley (2019) takes the reader on a mysterious journey through Hilton Head Island. While visiting the Island to see her grandparents, Delta Wells learns that her Pop’s history museum is going to be demolished in order to make room for a golf course. Delta can sense the pain and sorrow in those around her and makes it her mission to prevent this demolition. She visits the museum as well as the marsh around it and finds a skeleton whose bones of secret messages lead Delta and her brother, Jax, on a hopeful hunt to save their Pop’s beloved museum. Delta and Jax are led on a whirlwind of an adventure to not only save their grandfather's museum, but also to find a treasure known as "Jasper's Gems". Abandoned over 150 years ago, Delta and Jax revive the treasure hunt in order to reveal the secrets of Hilton Head Island.

The Secret of the Gullah Treasure by Carl Linke (2017) is interweaves school integration, the Civil Rights movement, previously unknown works by Edgar Allan Poe and Gullah traditions to illustrate an African American teen's resiliency in the mid-1960s. A unique feature of the novel are the QR codes in the book linked out to images of the places mentioned in the text, some of which belong to the BDC's Lucille Hasell Culp Collection hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library. Though the links used by Linke may not work now, they did at the time of publication. Linke was granted permission to use the images in his work. He has been a fulltime resident of Beaufort County since 2011.

Shuttered Windows by Florence Crannell Means (1938) was one of the first novels for young adults about African American life on the sea islands. It is the story of a 16-year-old African American girl from Minneapolis who relocates to the sea islands off "Bosquet" (Beaufort, SC) where she experiences culture shock. She learns to adjust to the Gullah way of life and dedicates herself to return to Bosquet as a teacher after additional schooling. While some may take issue with the dialect in her Shuttered Windows and Great Day in the Morning (1946) novels, her characterizations of strong-willed and powerful female protagonists withstand the passage of time. BTW: Means was one of the first writers of multicultural books for children and teens. Her goal was to promote racial equality among those whose opinions were in the process of formation by writing empathetically about the conditions faced by American minorities: African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Japanese Americans.

Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill (2007) was published in Canada as The Book of Negroes that same year. Hill's multiple award-winning book is rooted on a 1783 naval ledger kept by the British to account for the 3000 enslaved and free Black Loyalists who were transported into Canada at the end of the American Revolution. Hill's novel is told from the perspective of an African child, Aminata, who was stolen at age 11 from her village. She is first enslaved on a St. Helena Island indigo plantation. But her yearning to be free places her in conflict with her owners. She learns to read and write in secret in expectation that doing so will help her to get back to Africa. She becomes skilled as a midwife. Her literacy and personal knowledge of the transported Black Loyalists allow her to work on compiling the Book of Negroes in the novel. Her tale covers six decades, 1745 to 1805, three continents, Africa, North American and Europe, and topics related to enslavement, abolitionism, and what it means to be a human being. I agree with Publishers Weekly that "Hill's book is a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force."

Storm Center by Elizabeth Verner Hamilton (1983) is a compilation of retellings of the great Sea Island Hurricane of 1893. Hamilton uses real names and real events in order to connect these stories but does dip into the realm of fiction in order to do so. She has stated that she “treated it as a work of fiction, but it should come under the category of oral history”. The reader comes to care for the families in this title, but then soon follows them through one of the most frightening times of their lives.

Ten Days in Brazzaville by Scott Graber (2011) by Beaufort attorney and Island News columnist Scott Graber is a legal thriller that begins in Beaufort but quickly shifts setting elsewhere. A 750-word letter received in his lowcountry office takes him to sub-Saharan Africa and the denouement upends Jake Timrod's understanding of how the world really works.

Trouble the Water: A Novel by Rebecca Dwight Bruff (2019) is a tale of Robert Smalls, known for commandeering the Planter and sailing himself and his loved ones to freedom. Bruff expands upon the more well-known aspects of Smalls' life by providing context into how these events materialized in the first place. From being born into slavery, being sent to Charleston to work at the age of twelve, then being assigned to work on the Planter; this story walks the reader through every event that defined Smalls’ life and led him to the courageous act of sailing a Confederate warship into the hands of the Union. It is a popular selection for local book clubs. 

Truer Words by Kim Poovey (2012) was inspired by her volunteer service at the Verdier House owned by the Beaufort Historic Foundation. She created an alter ego for her guided tours of the historic house, a southern Victorian lady named Emma Victoria Brown. She brings Emma to life in this novel. 

The Tubman Command: A Novel by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman (2019) tells the tactical tale of the largest plantation raid - known as the Combahee River Raid - of the Civil War led by Harriet Tubman. Under the code name Moses, Tubman assists the Union under multiple roles as a scout, spy, and nurse in an intrepid initiative to counteract the Confederacy. Assigned a team of black scouts by General David Hunter, she guides her team on a massive mission to lead hundreds of enslaved African Americans along the Combahee River to freedom.

Please note: There are other novels in the BDC's holdings that could have been highlighted. I borrowed some of Cassandra's and Sydney's work from other Connections posts and the BDC's Facebook page to complete this one.