Roark Whitney Wickliffe Bradford had an ideal background for writing the plantation stories and sketches of southern black people that made him a celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s. He was born to Richard C. and Patricia Adelaide Tillman Bradford on 21 August 1896 on his family's cotton plantation in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, near the Mississippi River. That plantation, and the black sharecroppers who worked it, provided the primary influence for the settings and characters of much of his fiction. Although he was descended from William Bradford, Puritan governor of Massachusetts, his ancestors had moved to Virginia in the early eighteenth century, and both of his grandfathers had fought for the Confederacy.

After study at home and in the public schools, Bradford attended the University of California. During World War I he was a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Artillery Reserve and was stationed in the Canal Zone...