Burnett, Hallie Southgate (1908–1991)

American novelist and editor. Born Hallie Southgate in St. Louis, Missouri, on December 3, 1908; died in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 4, 1991; daughter of John McKnight (a consulting engineer) and Elizabeth (Baker) Southgate; married Robert Abbott (divorced); married Whit Burnett (co-founder and editor of Story magazine), 1942 (died April 22, 1973); married William Zeisel, 1977; children: (second marriage) John Southgate; Whitney Ann Burnett .

Selected writings:

A Woman in Possession (Dutton, 1951); This Heart, This Hunter (Holt, 1953); The Brain Pickers (Messner, 1957); The Watch on the Wall (Morrow, 1965); On Writing a Short Story (Harper, 1983).

Hallie Burnett's career began with her marriage in 1942 to Whit Burnett, who had cofounded and, for 11 years, co-edited the prestigious Story, a magazine of short stories published in book form, with his first wife Martha Foley . (Foley and Whit Burnett had just divorced in 1942.) As assistant editor of Story, Hallie brought to print the early short stories of notables like J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote. Burnett regarded her first novel A Woman in Possession, as an experiment written around her duties as a wife and mother. Because of its satisfactory reception, she wrote a second novel, This Heart, This Hunter (1953), which had developed out of a short story. "It also grew from a long time interest in how men satisfied their desire for power," said Burnett. Both of the novels were set in college towns (perhaps drawn from the time of her first marriage when she was a faculty wife at Yale) and dealt with the emotional problems of intelligentsia. Henry Jackson, of the San Francisco Chronicle, praised Burnett's second novel as fulfilling the promise of her first, describing the work as "a truer novel than most, written with a simple warmth and knowledge that are rare." Hallie Burnett went on to write two additional novels and a textbook, and she edited several anthologies of fiction. She also taught literature and creative writing at the University of Missouri, Sarah Lawrence College, and Hunter College, among other schools.

sources:

Candee, Marjorie Dent, ed. Current Biography 1954. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1954.

Moritz, Charles, ed. Current Biography Yearbook 1991. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1991.