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"B" is for Baldwin, William Plews, III (b. 1944)

South Carolina From A to Z
SC Public Radio

"B" is for Baldwin, William Plews, III (b. 1944). Novelist. Baldwin was born in McClellanville and reared in the lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina. After graduating from Clemson, he settled in McClellanville where he has made a living by crabbing, oystering, shrimping, serving as a magistrate, writing screenplays for Hollywood, designing and building houses, and by writing fiction. Baldwin’s first novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy (1993),was universally well received, winning the Lillian Smith Award for Fiction and becoming a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In the oral tradition of the South, the novel is narrated by a fourteen-year-old boy, who in 1916 is sent on a mythic journey to gain his manhood. In addition writing fiction, William Plews Baldwin, III, has published several nonfiction works about historic Charleston and the plantations of the lowcountry.

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Dr. Walter Edgar has two programs on South Carolina Public Radio: Walter Edgar's Journal, and South Carolina from A to Z. Dr. Edgar received his B.A. degree from Davidson College in 1965 and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1969. After two years in the army (including a tour of duty in Vietnam), he returned to USC as a post-doctoral fellow of the National Archives, assigned to the Papers of Henry Laurens.