Anne Moody

Anne Moody was born on September 15, 1940 and grew up poor in rural Mississippi. After her parents separated, Moody lived with her mother and siblings. As a child and teenager, she worked for white families in the area. As a college student, she became involved in the civil rights movement, working with such famous activists as Medgar Evers and Joan Trumpauer. She participated in a now famous sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina to protest segregation in public spaces. In the mid-1960s, Moody moved to New York, going “underground” and refusing to do media interviews. During this time, she wrote Coming of Age in Mississippi. In 1967, Moody married Austin Strauss, a Jewish NYU graduate student. In 1971, she and Strauss had a child, Sasha Strauss. In 1972, the family moved to Berlin for two years. After returning to America in 1974, she wrote Mr. Death: Four Stories and a sequel to her autobiography, Farewell to Too Sweet, which remains unpublished. In the 1990s, Moody returned to Mississippi. She died on February 5, 2015, in the care of her sister, Adline.