Margaret Jones Bolsterli (1931–)

Margaret Jones Bolsterli is an acclaimed professor emerita at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) who hails from the Arkansas Delta. She has written and edited several memoirs, including Born in the Delta. In 2012, she won the Porter Fund Literary Prize.

Margaret Jones was born on October 10, 1931, in Watson (Desha County) to Grover Cleveland Jones and Zena Cason Jones. She grew up on her family’s small cotton farm during the Great Depression with her brothers Grover, Paul (who died of rheumatic fever while Margaret was still an infant), Jodie, and Bob; her sister, Pauline; Ted Willis, a cousin the family had adopted; and her father’s sister, Sarah Virginia Jones. Jones was the youngest of the children. Her father farmed cotton, and her mother kept house and rented a room to the Watson schoolteacher.

As a child, Jones enjoyed hunting, fishing, and playing in the swampy area just behind her family’s house with her brother Bob. The children had little supervision, so they would spend most of the warm summer days exploring the swamp in an old boat, unafraid of the many venomous snakes they encountered because, according to Jones, they knew how to shoot and killed “snakes and turtles by the thousands.” Though she spent her free time with Bob and her other brothers, it was Jones’s sister Pauline who looked after her until Pauline married when Jones was five.

Jones’s mother and Mary Myrtle Jones (no relation), the teacher from Mississippi who boarded with the family while teaching in Watson, influenced her future academic pursuits with their shared love of grammar. Aside from Ted, everyone in the Jones household were great readers, and the family subscribed to magazines and newspapers, such as the Saturday Evening Post and the Arkansas Gazette. When Jones began school in 1936, she attended the one-room schoolhouse in Watson, but she got a driver’s license when she was thirteen and drove herself twelve miles away from the family farm to the high school at Dumas (Desha County). There, she graduated in a class of twenty-eight.

Jones attended college at the University of Arkansas, where she earned a BA with honors in 1952. She then attended Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she was awarded an MA in 1953. She married Mark Bolsterli on December 30, 1953, and they had two sons, Eric (born 1957) and David (born 1959). She and her husband divorced in 1964. She earned a PhD in English from the University of Minnesota in 1967, writing her dissertation on “Bedford Park: A Practical Experiment in Aesthetics.”

Margaret Jones Bolsterli began working as an assistant professor of English at Augsburg College in Minneapolis in 1967. The next year, she returned to Arkansas and become an assistant professor of English at UA, where she “taught courses on the literature of the South and southern women” for twenty-five years, retiring in 1993. During her time at UA, she was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1970–1971) and a fellow of the Arkansas Endowment for the Humanities (1980–1981). She also served as a Fulbright lecturer in Portugal from 1985 to 1986. Bolsterli published The Early Community at Bedford Park: The Pursuit of “Corporate Happiness” in the First Garden Suburb in 1977. She also edited two memoirs written by Southern women, Vinegar Pie and Chicken Bread: A Woman’s Diary of Life in the Rural South, 1890–1891 (1982) and A Remembrance of Eden: Harriet Bailey Bullock Daniel’s Memories of a Frontier Plantation in Arkansas, 1849–1872 (2000), as well as Things You Need to Hear: Collected Memories of Growing Up in Arkansas, 1890–1980 (2012), a compilation of recollections from Arkansans who have lived throughout the state.

Additionally, Bolsterli has written three of her own memoirs, beginning with Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility, which was first published in 1991. During Wind and Rain: The Jones Family Farm in the Arkansas Delta, 1848–2006 followed in 2008, and she wrote the third, Kaleidoscope: Redrawing an American Family Tree in 2015, once she learned of her family’s mixed-race heritage.

After she retired from UA in 1993, Bolsterli moved to a cattle farm in Wesley (Madison County), but she did not stop writing. Yale University’s Program in Agrarian Studies awarded her a fellowship to study agrarian history from 1997 to 1998. In 2012, Bolsterli won the Porter Fund Literary Prize, a $2,000 prize awarded annually to an Arkansan writer with a “substantial and impressive body of work.” Bolsterli wrote an opera, During the Wind and Rain, based on her grandfather’s life in the Arkansas Delta, which premiered on April 20, 2017, at the Argenta Theater in North Little Rock (Pulaski County). She has also published works in Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, Centennial Review, Feminary, Carleton Miscellany, D. H. Lawrence Review, Southern Quarterly, and Westbere Review.

For additional information:
Bolsterli, Margaret Jones. Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

———. During Wind and Rain: The Jones Family Farm in the Arkansas Delta, 1848–2006. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008.

———. Kaleidoscope: Redrawing an American Family Tree. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2015.