Fannie Flagg

Fannie Flagg is both a bestselling author and an actress. She was born Patricia Neal in Birmingham, Alabama.

Flagg has acted both on stage in Broadway musicals and in several television productions. She was in such movies as Five Easy Pieces, Stay Hungry, and Crazy in Alabama. She began her acting career early, at age 13 she says.

However, she was dissatisfied as a performer. In 1978, she attended a writer's conference to meet her idol, Eudora Welty. While there, she submitted a short story to a contest the conference was sponsoring. The story won first place and a Harper & Row editor asked her to make that short story into a full book, thus launching her writing career.

As an author, she is best known for her book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. One of Flagg's latest books is Standing in the Rainbow. It focused on a middle-class family from Missouri. Flagg said she spent four years researching the idea after hearing about a group of women known as radio homemakers. "These women would broadcast radio shows out of their living rooms," she said. They'd share their lives with the women who listened to the program. Since they were around for twenty years, they became known as radio neighbors. The whole concept is really a slice of America."

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--B. Redman