In the end, we simply did our best to carry out Olive Ann’s last wishes. Norma cleaned up and typed the chapters that Olive Ann had left for her. She transcribed all of the notes she found on the backs of envelopes and on innumerable scraps of paper tucked away in every room of the house. When it was all together, we had fifteen chapters—chapters that Olive Ann surely would have rewritten again, given the chance, but chapters that we feel are worth publishing just as they are.
Katrina Kenison
January 1992
Acknowledgments
A number of people contributed their time and their memories of Olive Ann for this reminiscence. I am grateful to Faith Brunson, Nathan and Jean LeGrand, Becky Sparks, John Sparks, and Jane Willingham. Frances Apt edited the manuscript with sensitivity and care. Special thanks go to Norma Duncan, who transcribed hundreds of pages of manuscript and did everything in her power to fulfill Olive Ann Burns’s wishes for this book.
About the Author
OLIVE ANN BURNS was born in 1924 on a farm in Banks County, Georgia, and went to school in nearby Commerce, which was the model for Cold Sassy. She attended Mercer University in Macon, Georgia; received a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and for ten years was on the Sunday magazine staff of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. When she learned she was battling cancer, Burns decided to try her hand at fiction, “for something more exciting to think about than fever and chemotherapy.” The result was Cold Sassy Tree, which became a national bestseller and was nominated for an American Book Award. The sequel to Cold Sassy Tree, Leaving Cold Sassy, became a New York Times bestseller. It was Burns’s final work before her death in 1990.
Leaving Cold Sassy: The Unfinished Sequel to Cold Sassy Tree Page 26
