“B” is for Boyd, Blanche McCrary (b. 1945)

“B” is for Boyd, Blanche McCrary (b. 1945). Writer, educator. Born in Charleston, Boyd graduated from Pomona College and received her M. A. from Stanford University. She joined the faculty at Connecticut College in 1982. Boyd has published four novels: Nerves (1973), Mourning the Death of Magic (1977), The Revolution of Little Girls (1991), and Terminal Velocity (1997). The last two are part of a trilogy telling the story of Ellen Burns, a Charleston native who experiences an unsatisfying marriage, experiments with heavy drinking and drugs, and loses herself through various affairs and lifestyle changes. Boyd's fiction reveals a deep concern with the culture of the American South. In 1981 Blanche McCrary Boyd published a collection of essays, The Redneck Way of Knowledge: Down- Home Tales, that features autobiographical accounts of the South Carolina world she knows well.