Thomas Hal Phillips

Bill to finance a master's degree in writing at the University of Alabama, which resulted in a thesis that later became his first novel, The Bitterweed Path.

[2] His adviser was Hudson Strode and the thesis won Phillips a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1947 and the Eugene F. Saxton Award in 1948.

[6][7] Phillips, for whom Corinth-based writer Henry Dalton was a mentor,[4] was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for work in fiction in 1953 and again in 1956.

[6] However, Jan Stuart says that Thomas wrote speeches and literature for Rubel but was himself a "dyed-in-the-wool" Democrat: To the young Tom, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was God.

He would later admire, if not exalt, JFK, Jimmy Carter and, despite the blotch of scandal and impeachment, William Jefferson Clinton.

[2]The film rights to Phillips's 1955 novel The Loved and the Unloved were sold[4] and in the 1960s, he began working with Hollywood director Robert Altman.