Stark Young was born on October 11, 1881, in Como. In 1897, two years after his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, he enrolled at the University of Mississippi, where he received his B.A. in 1901, followed by an M.A. from Columbia University in New York the next year. His artistic career began in earnest when he was appointed to teach English at the University of Mississippi in 1904 and spanned the next half century, including poetry, drama, literature, criticism, and painting. He published his first volume of poetry, The Blind Man at the Window and Other Poems, in 1906, and his first novel, Heaven Trees, in 1926. His most popular work of fiction, So Red the Rose, was published in 1934 and was later adapted as a movie. His literary portraits of southern humanism sought to redeem the image of the South after the destruction wrought by the Civil War and the brutal reality of slavery. He died on January 6, 1963, in New York.