Berry Morgan was born into an old, landed Roman Catholic family who settled in Port Gibson, Mississippi, in 1798. Doubtless, during her childhood while she was cared for by black house servants, she formed the foundation of the acute and accurate perception of the relationships among blacks and whites that comprise the content of her art. She attended Loyola University in New Orleans (1947) and Tulane University (1948-1949), married an oil geologist, and continued to live in Port Gibson on Albena Plantation. In 1966 she was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for a trilogy to be called "Certain Shadows," and in that same year Pursuit the first novel of the trilogy, was published. In the fall of 1972 and after a divorce, she accepted an appointment as writer-in-residence at Northeast Louisiana University in Monroe, Louisiana, from which she commuted on weekends to Albena Plantation. Her next book, The Mystic Adventures of...