Helen Norris Papers

Helen Norris, daughter of Elmer Wharton and Louise Brown Norris, was born in Miami, Florida, on June 22, 1916. She moved with her family to Montgomery, Alabama, at an early age. She attended the University of Alabama and earned her bachelor's degree in English in 1938 and her master's degrees in creative writing in 1940. She became the first person in a southern college or university to receive an MA degree using a work of creative writing in lieu of a thesis. That thesis was a draft of what became her first novel, Something More Than Earth, which was published in 1940.

Shortly after graduating, she married Thomas Reuben Bell Jr., a UA Law School graduate, and moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and later Sylacauga, Alabama. The couple had two children: Tommy and DeeDee. The marriage ended in divorce in 1965 after DeeDee was killed by a car while riding a bike at age 13. In 1966, after a year working toward a PhD at Duke University, she returned to Montgomery, where she taught English at Huntingdon College. After her retirement in 1979, she devoted her time once again to her writing.

Norris published five novels and five collections of short stories. Two of her short stories have been made into television films, the first by HBO in 1988 and the other by PBS in 1999. She won several literary awards including the Andrew Lytle Prize for Best Short Story (twice) and had stories included in the O. Henry Awards Prize Stories in 1984, 1985, 1987, and 1991. She was awarded the Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Distinguished Writer in 2000, the Alabama Library Association's Alabama Author Award in 2002, and was elected the sixth Poet Laureate of Alabama from 1999-2003.

In 2003, Norris moved to Black Mountain, North Carolina. She died on November 18, 2013.