18-05-2025
A whole new chapter for one of SC's greatest writers, Beaufort's Ann Head
The story ends with Ann Head's disturbing death.
'Unlike her fiction, her ending was never resolved,' her daughter Nancy Thode writes in a biography of her mother that launched in Beaufort on Saturday.
Ann Head is a little-known native of Beaufort who overcame personal fears to become one of South Carolina's most accomplished writers. At the time of her death in 1968, she was believed to be South Carolina's most widely-read novelist.
They said a stroke or cerebral aneurysm ended Ann Head's life at age 52, only a day and a half after yet another night at home was torn apart by the rage of her husband, well-respected Beaufort doctor Stan Morse.
He would not let Nancy see her mother in the hospital. And there was no autopsy.
When the stabs of fate are more than plot lines on paper, they hurt – for 57 years, and counting -- for Ann Head's two daughters who call their mother's last chapter 'the enduring unknown.'
'Not knowing has haunted Stacey and me to this day,' Thode writes in the last chapter of 'Ahead of Her Time: The Trailblazing Life and Literary Legacy of Ann Head' from Evening Post Books in Charleston.
Now the story can have a different ending.
The world can now better appreciate the woman who was Pat Conroy's first writing mentor when he was a Beaufort High School student.
It can read the correspondence between the two when Conroy was at The Citadel. It can see how Ann Head's four novels – including the young-adult classic 'Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones' and 'Fair With Rain' – came to be, and read samplings from her more than 50 magazine stories that have been unearthed to date through eBay and other searches.
Ann Head's story involves one of Beaufort's most historic families, a sudden marriage and divorce from the eventual inventor of the Head Ski, and the sad tale of the dream boat from hell that almost sank her second marriage. It traces family tragedy, a nervous breakdown at age 8, and plenty of sex and intrigue -- including a mention of Murdaugh madness of old.
Ann Head was born Anne Wales Christensen to Niels Christensen and Nancy Stratton in October 1915.
The Christensens are a well-educated, cultured family that has contributed to Beaufort's fabric in many ways since Ann Head's grandmother, Abbie Holmes Christensen, arrived in Beaufort with her abolitionist parents during the Civil War. The Strattons were proper Boston elites, and young Ann Head split her life between these two poles.
Beaufort historian Larry Rowland says Thode's biography offers 'a revealing description of mid-twentieth century Beaufort.'
But the crux of the story is that a divorced woman who smoked, drank and read The New Yorker had to support herself and her young daughter with a typewriter and empty sheets of paper.
And she did it.
She filled page after page with complex characters and subject matter that pushed the boundaries, much like her personal life that included affairs with married men, a pregnancy hidden through a tangled scheme, and a second marriage that brought her stability and standing, but also turmoil.
Ann Head tapped into the world of magazines, where she had to cater to the demand for soft endings, but her characters and Lowcountry settings could bring her decent money when America entertained itself by reading well-illustrated magazines instead of staring at cell phones.
She sat at the typewriter every day, listening to the music of Broadway shows or opera, wearing little rubber finger tips.
From there, often looking over the Beaufort River, she attracted an international audience, the moguls of Hollywood and the admiration of other writers on the world stage – especially Samuel Hopkins Adams, a mentor who wintered in Beaufort.
'Boy, did she push the boundaries,' said Harlan Greene of Charleston, the writer, historian and archivist who suggested the biography and mentored Thode through the five-year process.
'There seem to be no boundaries between her life and her writing,' Greene said. 'It's like what came first, the chicken or the egg.'
Ann Head was loved and admired in Beaufort, where if people were offended by some of her ways, they got over it. The town showed her grace when she needed it most.
Thode saw her mother as kind, and giving, and too modest about her writing accomplishments.
Pat Conroy was perhaps the first to tell the world about her, calling her his first novelist in an essay published in his 2004 book, 'The Pat Conroy Cookbook.' He placed a rose on Ann Head's tombstone in the St. Helena's churchyard every time he sold a book to a publisher.
But even he had no idea about all of his mentor's magazine stories, and how she supported herself and young Nancy through her art alone. In 2020, the family established the Ann Head Prize for Short Story Literature at Beaufort High School.
And the Ann Head story came full circle when the Pat Conroy Literary Center co-sponsored the biography's local launch event. And it featured high school students.
A year ago, Ann Head was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
But the newest chapter in the Ann Head story – the biography – has its own lessons to teach. 'I learned how scared she was,' Thode said. 'I learned how brave she was.
How she persevered through thick of thin, no matter what.' Thode said that from the age 3 to 13, it was just the two of them. A team, led by a mother plagued with various phobias.
'She never conveyed that fear to me. She always made me feel things were an adventure, if we didn't have enough money or enough food. It was, 'No. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this.' '
Thode may try to get some of her mother's novels back in print. So perhaps one of Beaufort's most remarkable stories will never end.
David Lauderdale may be reached at lauderdalecolumn@
