Centered around a small plantation in the heart of middle Georgia's nineteenth-century cotton culture, "The Granite Farm Letters" send forth from the Civil War years not simply a record of clashing armies at the front or of the fraying fabric of life at home but also the correspondence of a close-knit family--the candid love and longing of husband and wife, the warm bonds of parents and children held firm through the turbulence of war.

Julia Peterkin pioneered in demonstrating the literary potential for serious depictions of the African American experience. Rejecting the prevailing sentimental stereotypes of her times, she portrayed her black characters with sympathy and understanding, endowing them with the full dimensions of human consciousness. In these novels and stories, she tapped the richness of rural southern black culture and oral traditions to capture the conflicting realities in an African American community and to reveal a grace and courage worthy of black pride.