Ann Abadie, 1939 -2024

As many of you know, Ann Abadie passed away on July 30 following a brief illness.   As Ann was such a thoughtful and generous soul, she touched the lives of many people in various ways, including a great number in Oxford and those of us at Square Books, where she was a customer, of course, but a partner in many cultural endeavors and activities on campus and in town, and thus a dear friend to this bookstore.

     Ann was a South Carolina native and graduate of Wake Forest University who came to Oxford in pursuit of a PhD in literature.  She taught in the English Department — her husband, Dale, was a history professor — and Ann was instrumental in forming, fifty years ago, the first Faulkner Conference, and the Eudora Welty Symposium at UM in 1977.   She also would be a guiding force in the Blues Symposium and the formation of the Southern Foodways Alliance.  Most significantly, she was on a committee that determined the formation of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, then began working there as assistant director to Bill Ferris — then with Charles Wilson, Ted Ownby, and Katie McKee.

     Ann edited more thanx fifty books, including many in the series that emerged from the annual Faulkner Conferences, such as Faulkner and the Natural World and The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, as well as Eudora Welty: A Form of Thanks; the significant publication of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture; The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston; The Mississippi Encyclopedia; and, in 2023, American Landscapes: Meditations on Art and Literature in a Changing World. Having witnessed how the Faulkner Conference had been a great success, I contacted Ann — a longtime Howorth family friend — and wondered aloud to Ann whether it might be possible to stage a literary conference which might acknowledge writers other than “merely” Faulkner.   She replied, “Let me think about this.”   A few weeks later she returned my call and said, basically, “I think we can do this, but give me a few years.”   She needed time to clear the decks of the many other things she had going then.   Surely enough, that first book conference was in 1994, and Ann was the person who enlisted numerous partners, including Square Books, in this annual event that within its first few years would draw William Styron, Willie Morris, Beverly Lowry, poet Charles Simic, editor Nan Talese, Ann Patchett, Pat Conroy, and longtime owner of The Tattered Cover in Denver, the late Joyce Meskis.

      Ann, with her husband, history professor Dale Abadie, raised three lovely children — Elaine, Leslie and John  — also was well known for her talent in the kitchen, as she baked (and delivered) cakes (including her famous poundcake) — and various goodies to those who might need gladdening, or perhaps were having out-of-town guests.   She was always thinking of others, trying to help others, and shunned any praise directed her way.  Lyn Roberts reminded me today that Ann was “a person you absolutely could not say no to.”   This was not simply because Ann was very persuasive (and she was certainly that), but because you — for all of us who knew her — were forever in her debt because she had already done more for you than you could ever do to repay her.

– Richard Howorth

Image caption: Ann Abadie with Richard Howorth at Square Books — signing for Etheridge Knight, December, 1979.  Photo courtesy Bill Ferris.