Black Cloud, White Cloud (1963) Apostles of Light (1973) Ellen Douglas was the pen name of Josephine Ayres Haxton (July 12, 1921 – November 7, 2012), an American author.
Douglas was born in Natchez, Mississippi, and grew up in Hope, Arkansas, and Alexandria, Louisiana.
[4] One of her creative writing students was Larry Brown, a local Oxford firefighter who went on to publish many acclaimed works of fiction.
[5] She adopted the pen name Ellen Douglas before the publication of A Family’s Affairs to protect the privacy of two aunts, on whose lives she had based much of the plot.
[6] Margalit Fox writes that Douglas's work "explored the epochal divide between the Old South and the New, examining vast, difficult subjects — race relations, tensions between the sexes, the conflict between the needs of the individual and those of the community — through the small, clear prism of domestic life.