Lamb in His Bosom

In 1934, Caroline Miller's novel Lamb in His Bosom won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It was the first novel by a Georgia author to win a Pulitzer, soon followed by Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind in 1937. In fact, Lamb was largely responsible for the discovery of Gone With the Wind; after reading Miller's novel, Macmillan editor Harold S. Latham sought other southern novels and authors, and found Margaret Mitchell.Caroline Miller was fascinated by the other Old South—not the romantic inhabitants of Gone With the Wind, but rather the poor people of the south Georgia backwoods, who never owned a slave or planned to fight a war. The story of Cean and Lonzo, a young couple who begin their married lives two decades before the Civil War, Lamb in His Bosom is a fascinating account of social customs and material realities among settlers of the Georgia frontier. At the same time, Lamb in His Bosom transcends regional history as Miller's quietly lyrical prose style pays poignant tribute to a woman's life lived close to nature—the nature outside her and the nature within.

Caroline Miller was born in 1904. After her marriage, she began traveling through rural south Georgia, interviewing the people she met and planning a novel; as she had not attended college, her husband taught her about literature. "He was my college," she said. In 1934, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with Lamb in His Bosom. Her second novel, Lebanon, was published in 1944. Caroline Miller died in 1992.