Florence King
Encyclopedia
Florence Virginia King is an American novelist, essayist and columnist.
While her early writings focused on the American South
and those who live there, much of King's later work has been published in National Review
. Until her retirement in 2002, her column in National Review, "The Misanthrope's Corner", was known for "serving up a smorgasbord of curmudgeonly critiques about rubes and all else bothersome to the Queen of Mean", as the magazine put it. After leaving retirement in 2006, she began writing a new column for National Review entitled "The Bent Pin."
King is a traditionalist conservative
, but not a "movement conservative," and she objects to much of the populist
direction of the contemporary American Right. King labels herself a "misanthrope". She is an active Episcopalian (though she often refers to her agnosticism
), a member of Phi Alpha Theta
, and a monarchist.
to a British
father and an American mother (Herbert Frederick King and Louise Ruding King), Florence King grew up in the District with her parents, her maternal grandmother and her grandmother's maid. Each of these people influenced her development as a person. In particular, her grandmother required high standards of behavior from Florence, referring to the family as descendants of Virginia's colonial elite. In many of her writings, King often refers to the comical contradictions between the material reality of her upbringing (lower middle class
) and the snob
bish behavior of her grandmother.
In 1957, King received her B.A. in history from American University
in Washington D.C., where she was inducted into Phi Alpha Theta
. She also attended the University of Mississippi
as a graduate student, but did not complete her M.A. degree after the traumatic loss of her former girlfriend in a car crash.
. From 1964 to 1967, King was a feature writer for the Raleigh News and Observer. While at the newspaper, Miss King received the North Carolina Press Woman Award for reporting.
The majority of King’s works under her own name have been non-fiction essays. She also wrote a historical romance novel, Barbarian Princess, under the pseudonym
Laura Buchanan. King has also admitted to having written numerous pornographic stories, pulp paperback books
and erotica under various pseudonyms. She gained national attention with her column "The Misanthrope's Corner" in National Review, a conservative magazine of political and social commentary. In addition, she wrote numerous articles for The American Enterprise
magazine.
King's first book published under her own name was 1975's Southern Ladies and Gentlemen. The work provides a humorous guide to the South for "Yankees". Her most popular book, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (1985), is a semi-autobiographical work focusing on, among other things, her grandmother's, mother's, and father's construct of "a lady."
In Confessions, King says she had relationships with both men and women during college: one woman she fell in love with was killed in a car crash. This relationship was detailed in Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. She jokingly describes herself as a "conservative lesbian
feminist" and has been referred to as the "World's Funniest Bi-Sexual-Republican."
King has later expressed regret at revealing her bisexuality
, saying she did not want to be part of the "gay liberation movement" and embracing the concepts of "spinster
hood" and "the old maid
."
In 1995, King publicly accused the writer Molly Ivins
of plagiarizing
her work. Ivins publicly acknowledged and apologized for her error in an exchange of letters in the next issue of that magazine, which may be found quoted in an account of the controversy
King, who now lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia
, retired in 2002 (at which time National Review
published an anthology of her columns entitled STET, Damnit!), but resumed writing a monthly column for National Review in 2006, titled in 2007 "The Bent Pin". A selection of her book reviews and articles was released under the title Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again in October 2006.
While her early writings focused on the American South
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
and those who live there, much of King's later work has been published in National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
. Until her retirement in 2002, her column in National Review, "The Misanthrope's Corner", was known for "serving up a smorgasbord of curmudgeonly critiques about rubes and all else bothersome to the Queen of Mean", as the magazine put it. After leaving retirement in 2006, she began writing a new column for National Review entitled "The Bent Pin."
King is a traditionalist conservative
Traditionalist Conservatism
Traditionalist conservatism, also known as "traditional conservatism," "traditionalism," "Burkean conservatism", "classical conservatism" and , "Toryism", describes a political philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, tradition, hierarchy and...
, but not a "movement conservative," and she objects to much of the populist
Populism
Populism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
direction of the contemporary American Right. King labels herself a "misanthrope". She is an active Episcopalian (though she often refers to her agnosticism
Agnosticism
Agnosticism is the view that the truth value of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or unknowable....
), a member of Phi Alpha Theta
Phi Alpha Theta
Phi Alpha Theta is an American honor society for undergraduate and graduate students and professors of history.The society is a charter member of the Association of College Honor Societies and has over 350,000 members, with about 9,500 new members joining each year through 860 local chapters.-...
, and a monarchist.
Early life
Born in Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
to a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
father and an American mother (Herbert Frederick King and Louise Ruding King), Florence King grew up in the District with her parents, her maternal grandmother and her grandmother's maid. Each of these people influenced her development as a person. In particular, her grandmother required high standards of behavior from Florence, referring to the family as descendants of Virginia's colonial elite. In many of her writings, King often refers to the comical contradictions between the material reality of her upbringing (lower middle class
Lower middle class
In developed nations across the world, the lower middle class is a sub-division of the greater middle class. Universally the term refers to the group of middle class households or individuals who have not attained the status of the upper middle class associated with the higher realms of the middle...
) and the snob
Snob
A snob is someone who believes that some people are inherently inferior to him or her for any one of a variety of reasons, including real or supposed intellect, wealth, education, ancestry, taste, beauty, nationality, et cetera. Often, the form of snobbery reflects the snob's personal attributes...
bish behavior of her grandmother.
In 1957, King received her B.A. in history from American University
American University
American University is a private, Methodist, liberal arts, and research university in Washington, D.C. The university was chartered by an Act of Congress on December 5, 1892 as "The American University", which was approved by President Benjamin Harrison on February 24, 1893...
in Washington D.C., where she was inducted into Phi Alpha Theta
Phi Alpha Theta
Phi Alpha Theta is an American honor society for undergraduate and graduate students and professors of history.The society is a charter member of the Association of College Honor Societies and has over 350,000 members, with about 9,500 new members joining each year through 860 local chapters.-...
. She also attended the University of Mississippi
University of Mississippi
The University of Mississippi, also known as Ole Miss, is a public, coeducational research university located in Oxford, Mississippi. Founded in 1844, the school is composed of the main campus in Oxford, four branch campuses located in Booneville, Grenada, Tupelo, and Southaven as well as the...
as a graduate student, but did not complete her M.A. degree after the traumatic loss of her former girlfriend in a car crash.
Career
King had several occupations before she began writing as a career. In the mid-1950s, she was a history teacher in Suitland, Maryland. Later in the decade, she was a file clerk at the National Association of RealtorsNational Association of Realtors
The National Association of Realtors , whose members are known as Realtors, is North America's largest trade association. representing over 1.2 million members , including NAR's institutes, societies, and councils, involved in all aspects of the residential and commercial real estate industries...
. From 1964 to 1967, King was a feature writer for the Raleigh News and Observer. While at the newspaper, Miss King received the North Carolina Press Woman Award for reporting.
The majority of King’s works under her own name have been non-fiction essays. She also wrote a historical romance novel, Barbarian Princess, under the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Laura Buchanan. King has also admitted to having written numerous pornographic stories, pulp paperback books
Lesbian pulp fiction
Lesbian pulp fiction refers to any mid-20th century paperback novel with overtly lesbian themes and content. Lesbian pulp fiction was published in the 1950s and 60s by many of the same paperback publishing houses that other genres of fiction including Westerns, Romances, and Detective Fiction...
and erotica under various pseudonyms. She gained national attention with her column "The Misanthrope's Corner" in National Review, a conservative magazine of political and social commentary. In addition, she wrote numerous articles for The American Enterprise
The American Enterprise
The American Enterprise was a public policy magazine published by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Its editorial stance was politically conservative, generally advocating free-market economics and a neoconservative U.S. foreign policy.The magazine was published approximately...
magazine.
In Confessions, King says she had relationships with both men and women during college: one woman she fell in love with was killed in a car crash. This relationship was detailed in Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. She jokingly describes herself as a "conservative lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
feminist" and has been referred to as the "World's Funniest Bi-Sexual-Republican."
King has later expressed regret at revealing her bisexuality
Bisexuality
Bisexuality is sexual behavior or an orientation involving physical or romantic attraction to both males and females, especially with regard to men and women. It is one of the three main classifications of sexual orientation, along with a heterosexual and a homosexual orientation, all a part of the...
, saying she did not want to be part of the "gay liberation movement" and embracing the concepts of "spinster
Spinster
A spinster, or old maid, is an older, childless woman who has never been married.For a woman to be identified as a spinster, age is critical...
hood" and "the old maid
Old Maid
Old maid is a Victorian card game for two to eight players probably deriving from an ancient gambling game in which the loser pays for the drinks. It is known in Germany as Schwarzer Peter, in Sweden as Svarte Petter and in Finland as Musta Pekka and in France as le pouilleux or vieux garçon...
."
In 1995, King publicly accused the writer Molly Ivins
Molly Ivins
Mary Tyler "Molly" Ivins was an American newspaper columnist, populist, political commentator, humorist and author.-Early life and education:Ivins was born in Monterey, California, and raised in Houston, Texas...
of plagiarizing
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
her work. Ivins publicly acknowledged and apologized for her error in an exchange of letters in the next issue of that magazine, which may be found quoted in an account of the controversy
King, who now lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia
Fredericksburg, Virginia
Fredericksburg is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia located south of Washington, D.C., and north of Richmond. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 24,286...
, retired in 2002 (at which time National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
published an anthology of her columns entitled STET, Damnit!), but resumed writing a monthly column for National Review in 2006, titled in 2007 "The Bent Pin". A selection of her book reviews and articles was released under the title Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again in October 2006.
Quotations
- King on stress: "The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol." (from "The Misanthrope's Corner", May 2001)
- King on the American attention span: "The American attention span always has gotten a lot of attention. The first to note our easy distractibility was Alexis de TocquevilleAlexis de TocquevilleAlexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in...
. His findings were echoed by Frederick Jackson Turner, but being an American, Turner used the more tactful and romantic 'restlessness.'
- "...Our distractibility is also the inevitable residue of our undisciplined feelings. The American proclivity for leaving our emotional lights on has drained the battery of our attention span dry. The human spirit can take only so much of 24-hour coverage, memorial services, ribbons, teddy bears, crisis counseling, and moments of silence. We pay such obsessive attention to disasterDisasterA disaster is a natural or man-made hazard that has come to fruition, resulting in an event of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life, or drastic change to the environment...
s and tragediesTragedy (event)A tragedy is an event in which one or more losses, usually of human life, occurs that is viewed as mournful. Such an event is said to be tragic....
that we end up seeking respite in forgetfulness. (Quick, name one Teheran hostage.)
- "Welcome to America, the Flea CircusFlea circusA flea circus refers to a circus sideshow attraction in which fleas are attached to miniature carts and other items, and encouraged to perform circus acts within a small housing...
. We now have a new disease, Attention Deficit Disorder, and like all democratic diseases, it does not discriminate. The good news is that by the time we run the gauntlet of ADD resources, clinics, programs, workshops, seminars, CBS Specials, and Sally StruthersSally StruthersSally Ann Struthers is an American actress and spokeswoman, best-known for her roles as Gloria Stivic on All in the Family, for which she won two Emmy awards, and as Babette on Gilmore Girls.-Personal life:...
promos, no one will remember what it is." (from "The Misanthrope's Corner", June 1995)
- King summed up her writing efforts in a May 2002 "Misanthrope's Corner": "Being a writer has made me a lifelong practitioner of no-holds-barred insight, driven by an irresistible impulse to shovel through mountains of received bull to get to the bottom of things."
- As an example of the manners taught to her by her grandmother, she wrote: "No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street." (from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, 1985)
Works
- Southern Ladies and Gentlemen (1975)
- WASP, Where is Thy Sting? (1977)
- Barbarian Princess (fiction - writing as Laura Buchanan) (1978)
- He: An Irreverent Look at the American Male (1978)
- When Sisterhood was in Flower (fiction) (1982)
- Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (1985)
- Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (1989)
- Lump It or Leave It (1990)
- With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy (1992)
- The Florence King Reader (anthology) (1995)
- STET, Damnit! (National Review column anthology) (2002)
- Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again (selected book reviews and essays) (2006)