Ward Greene(1892-1956)

American novelist Ward Greene was born in Asheville, NC, in 1892 to a family that could trace its lineage back to the American Revolution (one of his ancestors was Gen. Nathanael Greene of the Continental Army, who served under Gen. George Washington). When he was a child the family moved to Atlanta, GA, where he was raised. He attended the University of the South in Tennessee from 1912-1913, and in 1913 he took a job on the "Atlanta Journal" as an assistant sports editor. He stayed at the paper for ten years, graduating from the sports department to covering the police beat to finally becoming the paper's "star" reporter. In 1918 the paper sent him to the battlefields of France to cover the war from the perspective of troops from Georgia.

Returning to the US after the war, he began to write in his spare time, and his first novel, "Cora Potts", was published in 1929. He has written several novels since then, with his most famous one probably being "Death in the Deep South" (1936), which was based on the notorious Leo Frank case in 1915, in which a group of citizens in the Georgia town of Marietta lynched a Jewish man named Leo Frank who was in jail accused of the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl. As it turned out, Frank had nothing to do with the girl's death (she was raped and murdered by a janitor in the factory where her body was found, which was owned by Frank's family). The novel was a best-seller and was made into the film They Won't Forget (1937).

Ward Greene died of a heart attack in London, England, in 1969, at age 76.