Carolyn Osborn, noted author, journalist and educator, died Saturday after a fall at her Austin home. She was 92.
“The Texas Book Festival was Carolyn’s idea,” said journalist, educator and documentary maker Joe O’Connell on Sunday. “She had gone to a book festival elsewhere, and talked to Mary Margaret Farabee about starting one in Texas. They enlisted Laura Bush and the rest is history.”
Founded in 1995, the free literary festival draws hundreds of authors and tens of thousands of book enthusiasts to downtown Austin each fall.
Osborn, mother of American-Statesman reporter Claire Osborn, was a short story author, newspaper reporter and radio writer as well as an English instructor at the University of Texas. In 2009, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.
“She never quit writing fiction and reading it,” Claire Osborn said. “Not only was she a creative writing teacher at UT in the 1970s, but she also taught one summer at the Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico. She drew a lot of inspiration for her writing from her childhood during World War II.”
Carolyn June Culbert was born July 11, 1934, in Nashville, Tenn., to Katherine and William Culbert. Her brother, Billy, was born two years later. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, her father, an Annapolis graduate with three years naval service during the 1920s, was commissioned by the Army, then ordered to California. The family followed, but returned to Tennessee by 1943.
After her mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, Carolyn lived with various aunts. Her father divorced Katherine and married a Texan, Mabel Winter. The family moved to Gatesville, Texas, near Fort Hood, where William was assigned.
Carolyn graduated from Gatesville High School in 1951, then from the University of Texas with a degree in journalism in 1955. She earned her master’s degree in English literature in 1959.
Her stories have been honored with publication in the O. Henry Awards (1990) and Lone Star Literature (2003). She wrote two novels, “Contrary People” (2012) and “Uncertain Ground” (2009), and a memoir, “Durations” (2017), along with four collections of short stories.
Osborn’s literary papers — manuscripts, letters, proofs, photographs, clippings and printed material — are housed at the UT Ransom Center.
“She always wrote in longhand by pencil before transferring it to the computer,” Claire Osborn said. “She traveled all over the world with my father, from riverboat barges in France to crawling in tombs in Egypt.”
She was married for 71 years to Joe Osborn, whom she met on a blind date on Halloween in 1953. He survives her. They had three children: Celia, who predeceased her mother, Claire and William.
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