Bio: Jeannette Downes Coltharp, Caddo Parish La
Source: Chronicles of Shreveport and Caddo Parish, Maude Hearn O'Pry,
1928, 
Submitted by: Kay Thompson Brown

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                  JEANNETTE DOWNES COLTHARP

MRS COLTHARP is descended from a long line of Colonial soldiers, statesman and
writers ~ whose pedigree extends far back into English history. having
been horn in Louisiana when the old regime was becoming tradition, she knows
only the New South, but this she loves and understands, and is fitted by
thoughtful observation to describe the people among whom her life has been
spent. Her short stories, essays,' criticisms and articles pertaining to the
household, appeared in well known magazines and newspapers, but not until
"Burrell Coleman, Colored;' was published, did her fiction appear under her
own name. This novel was given a cordial welcome by her critics, and was
praised, highly, for its sincere delineation of plantation life with its
appreciation of two distinct elements, the white and the colored people. For
while these races dwell side by side they none the less live in two
worlds----each with his own peculiar ambitions, disappointments, his vanities,
charities, loves, sorrows and happiness, and Mrs. Coltharp was conceded the
first novelist to show sympathetically, from the southerner's point of view
the difference between them, and the compassionate dependence of each upon
the other. The value of her work lies in the fact that she has handed to
future history a sketch of them both, showing their home existence, their work
and their simple pleasures; for time is stealthily changing the plantation.
The automobile, among other inventions, is transmuting the isolated cotton
field into a merely suburban equation and another generation or two will know
it no more.