A large cottonmouth moccasin bit Walter Brennen in the face in a scene from the 1947 film Swamp Water. Leading lady, Anne Baxter, attempted to suck out the venom. Brennen’s character miraculously lived, and every kid who saw the movie was wide-eyed and told the story on the playground the next day. The hit movie was based on Vereen Bell’s novel of the same name, set in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp.

Bell was born in Cairo, Georgia in 1911. He would go on to graduate from Davidson College in North Carolina and then moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, to write for youth magazines. He married in 1934, and he and his family moved to Cairo briefly before raising their family in Thomasville.

For a short time, Bell worked as an editor for the American Boy/Youth’s Companion, a publication out of Detroit, Michigan. He preferred his South Georgia home and returned to write as a freelancer. By the late 1930’s, Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post were picking up his outdoor stories and wildlife photography. Bell’s two novels, Swamp Water and Two of a Kind, first appeared in serial in the Post.

In 1941, Swamp Water was published as a novel and within the year adapted into a film of the same name. The story follows a defiant young man into the wild Okefenokee, where his friendship with a fugitive (played by Walter Brennen) ignites a struggle within his rural community. In 1952, a remake of the film entitled Lure of the Wilderness was released. Both were filmed on location near Waycross, Georgia. Bell’s compelling depiction of the Okefenokee and its inhabitants received wide praise from reviewers.

Following his success, Bell collaborated with LIFE magazine for the feature entitled “LIFE Visits Okefenokee Swamp: Novelist Vereen Bell Guides Trip into Georgia’s Watery Wilderness” (May 1941). Two of a Kind (1943) tells a similar story of a young man’s conflicting loyalties against the backdrop of sporting dogs and field trials.

With the outbreak of World War II, Bell volunteered for naval service. His last published story was “Sis” which appeared in Collier’s in November 1944. Bell went on to attend the U.S. Navy’s air combat intelligence school at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. He served as a lieutenant in the Pacific aboard the USS Gambier Bay, an escort aircraft carrier. On the morning of October 25, 1944, the USS Gambier Bay was attacked and sunk by Japanese naval forces. As the attack was under way, Bell rushed to the ready room to put on his flying gear but was ordered by the commander to remain on board. He survived the ship’s sinking but succumbed to delirium and exposure sometime during the evening and was buried at sea off Samar Island in the Philippines.

The following year, his short stories were compiled and posthumously published under the title Brag Dog and Other Stories (1945). In 1946, the Georgia legislature honored Bell’s career by naming the roadway that leads into the Okefenokee Swamp the Vereen Bell Highway. In 1947, his college roommate, Grier Martin, established the Vereen Bell Award for Creative Writing at Davidson College. In 2015, Bell was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.