Eugenia Price, or “Genie” as her friends called her, was not interested in the fame and fortune that came along with her writing success. If you joined her over a glass of sweet tea on her porch, you’d quickly realize Price was mostly interested in the truth of the journey.

Eugenia Price was born on June 22, 1916, in West Virginia to Walter Welsey Price, a dentist, and Anna Davidson. She grew up admiring her parents, their influence following her into college. Initially, Price majored in English at Ohio University; her mother had nurtured a strong passion for writing, music, and history in her as a child. She transferred to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and changed her major to dentistry in her junior year. Price then switched to philosophy at the University of Chicago. However, she never graduated from college. At only 23 years old, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) hired Price to write daytime serials. There, she really hit her stride.

Due to Price’s success at NBC and several other companies, she started her own production company called Eugenia Price Productions in 1945. By the late 1940s, she had established herself as a successful radio host, producer, and writer.

Over time, she pivoted from writing scripts for others to writing about her own spirituality. She wrote twenty-two “inspirational” non-fiction books in her early days as a published author.  Price’s best example of this is her work The Burden Is Light (1955), where she bares her soul with a candor that was rare for the 1950s. Her writing feels personal, like chatting with her over cups of coffee. As readers connected with her writing, she traveled across the country to meet them in person.

In 1961, while on a book tour, Price and her lifelong friend, Joyce Blackburn, took a “wrong” turn and ended up on St. Simons Island, Georgia. Price fell in love with the area and St. Simons fueled a newfound sense of inspiration for her writing. She looked at the ruins of Christ Church and the moss-draped oaks and heard the whispers of the people who lived there a century before.

This was the beginning of her time as a historical fiction novelist. She shifted from the “why” of theology to the “who” of humanity, finding the pulse of her characters by looking at old letters rather than data. Her books The Beloved Invader (1965), New Moon Rising (1969) and The Lighthouse (1971) turned the Georgia coast into a pilgrimage site for millions of readers. The momentum from these novels carried her forward in her prolific writing career. She wrote fourteen historical fiction novels and three autobiographies.

Highly devoted to her readers, Price answered thousands of letters from fans by hand. She recognized that her books connected deeply with readers, and just how much her fans mattered. What made Price’s writing sing wasn’t just her prose but her fascination with belonging, as her characters were often outsiders trying to find their place in a changing world. This speaks directly to her readers and bridged a deep connection. “I don’t write for ‘the public,’” she once stated, “I write for a person.”

Prices’ books sold over 40 million copies, but those numbers were not what inspired her; She understood that value isn’t found in the transaction of selling a book, but in the transformation of the reader. For her work, she received the Governor’s Award for the Humanities in 1988. Eugenia Price passed away on May 28, 1996. She was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2017.