Anne Rivers Siddons
Known for her portrayals of the American South, Auburn University graduate Anne Rivers Siddons (1936-2019) penned 19 works of fiction that sold millions of copies throughout her lifetime; as a result, she frequently appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Her ability to capture place, especially the South, including Alabama, Atlanta, and parts of South Carolina, earned her fame and endeared her to audiences across the United States and the globe.
Sybil Anne Rivers was born on January 9, 1936, in Fairburn, Georgia, as the only child to patent lawyer Marvin Rivers and his wife Katherine, a secretary to the principal at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia. She was a cheerleader, graduated magna cum laude, and was admitted to Auburn University in 1954.
As a student at Auburn, Siddons joined the Delta Delta Delta sorority and was active on campus. She got her first taste of writing and journalism by working for the student newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman. In this role, she wrote two pro-integration columns, the second of which prompted her firing from the paper at the request of university administration. In the October 1957 column, Siddons condemned her community’s reaction to the integration of Little Rock Central High School a month prior. The experience would become a recurring theme in some of her later, fictionalized works.
After graduating from Auburn in 1958, Siddons made her home in Atlanta and soon began working for Atlanta magazine, eventually becoming an editor. In 1966, she married advertising executive Heywood Siddons and became a stepmother to his four sons. She made her first foray into nonfiction with the publication of John Chancellor Makes Me Cry (1975), a collection of autobiographical essays based on her experiences in Atlanta.
Loosely based on her time as a student at Auburn, Siddons’s first novel, Heartbreak Hotel, was published in 1976 and relies on themes that came to characterize much of her other books: women’s roles in the South, familial ties, activism, and environmentalism. The novel focuses on the story of a group of young sorority women enrolled in fictional Randolph University who find themselves coming of age in the turbulent civil rights era. Montgomery’s bus boycott, the admittance of the first Black student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and other events cause the women to question their privileged upbringings amidst the turmoil of their world. The novel was adapted as a motion picture under the title Heart of Dixie in 1989 by Orion Pictures.
The second of Siddons’s novels, The House Next Door (1978), was her first and only venture into the horror genre. It was hailed by acclaimed horror writer Stephen King as among the finest horror novels of the twentieth century. (Siddons later provided the introduction to King’s 1979 work, The Dead Zone.) Set in Atlanta, The House Next Door tells the story of a house that destroys each of the owners who come to live in it. Like Heartbreak Hotel, The House Next Door received a cinematic adaptation, a 2006 made-for-television release on the Lifetime Network.
As Siddons grew into her writing style, she often mirrored her own life stages and personal experiences. Fox’s Earth (1981), for instance, tells the story of matriarch Ruth Yancey, who is forced to define her role in a patriarchal world in which men hold all the power. The themes of family, place, and home in the lives of southern women defined Siddons’s works throughout her career. In a 1991 interview with People magazine, Siddons discussed the pressures southern culture places on women to be attractive and charming, noting that she was often left with a “hollow” feeling. Much of her writing has explored the ways that southern women grapple with such roles and expectations. Peachtree Road (1988), Siddons’s most commercially successful work of fiction, epitomizes that sense of hollowness through its portrayal of protagonist Lucy Bondurant, a rebellious southern belle forced to contend with the rigid culture of aristocratic Atlanta.
Siddons builds a strong sense of place in her novels, with setting being as important as the characters and their stories. Although her works are most often set in Atlanta and the Low Country of South Carolina, Siddons often includes specific places from her time in Alabama. For example, her final novel, The Girls of August (2014), mentions Alabama’s Gulf Coast and Fairhope, Baldwin County, as the narrator Madison McCauley fondly recalls a summer season spent along the white sands of the state’s coast.
Siddons was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2007. She maintained her ties to Auburn University throughout her life, establishing an endowed scholarship there. In 2013, she was the first winner of Auburn’s College of Liberal Arts Women’s Leadership Institute Lifetime Achievement Award.
Siddons died at her home in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2019 at the age of 83.
Selected Works by Anne Rivers Siddons
John Chancellor Makes Me Cry (1975)
Heartbreak Hotel (1976)
The House Next Door (1978)
Fox’s Earth (1981)
Peachtree Road (1988)
Outer Banks (1991)
Colony (1992)
Low Country (1998)
Sweetwater Creek (2005)
The Girls of August (2014)
