Local Author
Elizabeth Madox Roberts
Long before Springfield had a library card catalog, it had a storyteller. Elizabeth Madox Roberts turned the fields, farms, and families of Washington County into some of the most celebrated American fiction of the 1920s and 30s, and she never really left home to do it.
A Springfield Life
Rooted in Washington County
Roberts was born in Perryville, Kentucky in 1881, but Washington County is where she grew up and where she kept coming home to for the rest of her life. She spent a decade teaching elementary school in the Springfield area alongside her mother before eventually enrolling at the University of Chicago at age 36, finally earning the college education she’d wanted since childhood. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1921 and came straight back to Springfield to write.
Her Career
A Career Built on Home Ground
Roberts set her most acclaimed work in the world she knew best. Her first novel, The Time of Man (1926), told the story of a Kentucky tenant farmer’s daughter and earned her an international reputation almost overnight. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, as was her later novel The Great Meadow (1930), a historical account of Kentucky’s early settlement.
- The Time of Man (1926)
- My Heart and My Flesh (1927)
- Jingling in the Wind (1928)
- The Great Meadow (1930)
- A Buried Treasure (1931)
- The Haunted Mirror (1932)
- He Sent Forth a Raven (1935)
- Black Is My True Love’s Hair (1938)
- Song in the Meadow (1940)
- Not by Strange Gods (1941)
- Flood (2012, posthumous)
Her Legacy at WCPL
Roberts died in 1941 and was brought home to Springfield for burial, closing the loop on a life that never strayed far from Washington County no matter how far her stories traveled. Washington County Public Library is proud to hold a portrait gifted to us by Roberts herself, a small but meaningful piece of the community she wrote into American literary history.
Read Her Work
Free to Read
Several of Roberts’ books are in the public domain and available to read online:
For more on her life and legacy, visit the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society.