Shirley Ann Grau was born in New Orleans in 1929, spent part of her childhood in Alabama and graduated from Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1950. Her fiction, mostly set in the American South, examines race and gender.
Her books include The Black Prince, and Other Stories (1955), The Hard Blue Sky (1958), The Keepers of the House (1964) and Roadwalkers (1994). The Keepers of the House won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She died in Kenner, Louisiana, in 2020.