Patricia Cornwell

Sarah Dauncey (University of Cumbria)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 9 Jun 1956
Activity 1982-ongoing

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States; England

Genres and Modes

Crime and Detective

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Other

Historian / Chronicler

Resources

Patricia Cornwell, born Patricia Daniels, spent the first seven years of her life in Miami, Florida. She moved to North Carolina in 1963 with her mother and two brothers after the break-up of her parents’ marriage. Her childhood here was fraught with problems as her mother suffered from depression and had to be hospitalized. However, these difficulties led to her attachment to Ruth Graham, the wife of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, who was the subject of her first published book, A Time For Remembering: The Ruth Graham Story (1982). Cornwell’s Presbyterian background has been seen to influence the moral world of her fiction where representatives of human decency strive to protect communities from crime and violence. A…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2428 words

Citation: Dauncey, Sarah. "Patricia Cornwell". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 November 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=6032, accessed 27 November 2024.]

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here