Borden Deal

Borden Deal spent his early years on his parents’ farm in rural Mississippi, where he found lifelong passions for fishing and reading. After losing their farm during the Great Depression, the family relocated to a communal farming project. Deal then left home at the age of sixteen, after his father died in a truck accident. For the next decade, he worked many different jobs, including fighting wildfires with the Civilian Conservation Corps in the Pacific Northwest, harvesting wheat as a migrant laborer, and serving as an aviator cadet in the US Navy during World War II. In 1946, the author attended the University of Alabama, where he studied English, creative writing, and the philosophies of Carl Jung. He published his first short story, Exodus, in 1948, while still in university. He then went abroad for graduate school at Mexico City College, where he met his first wife, Lillian Slobotsky. This marriage produced one child but ended quickly in divorce. In 1952, Deal moved to Alabama and married the author Babs Hodges, with whom he would have three children before their divorce in 1975. In 1956, he began a prolific career of full-time writing, ultimately publishing twenty-one novels and over one hundred short stories. Much of his work depicts the daily lives of rural Southerners, often centering on their connection to land. During his four-decade writing career, Deal won multiple awards, including the 1957 Guggenheim Fellowship. A year after marrying his third wife, Patricia Deal, the author died of a heart attack at the age of 63.