Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author

Jennifer Horne

Jan 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Sara Sheckells

About this audiobook

Sara Mayfield was born into Alabama's governing elite in 1905 and grew up in a social circle that included Zelda Sayre, Sara Haardt, and Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead. After winning a Goucher College short story contest judged by H. L. Mencken, Mayfield became friends with Mencken and his circle, then visited with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and hobnobbed with the literati while traveling in Europe after a failed marriage. Back in Tuscaloosa after the war, however, she became increasingly paranoid about perceived conspiracies arrayed against her. Finally, her mother and brother committed her to Bryce Hospital for the Insane, where she remained for the next seventeen years. Throughout her life, Mayfield kept journals, wrote fiction, and produced thousands of letters while nursing the ambition that had driven her since childhood: to write and publish books. During her confinement, Mayfield assiduously recorded her experiences and her determined efforts-sometimes delusional, always savvy-to overturn her diagnosis and return to the world as a sane, independent adult. At fifty-nine, she was released from Bryce and later obtained a decree of "having been restored to sanity." She went on to publish noteworthy literary biographies of the Menckens and the Fitzgeralds, finally achieving her quest to become the author of books and her own life.

About the author

Jennifer Horne is writer, editor, teacher, former Poet Laureate of Alabama, and author of three collections of poetry, Tell the World You're a Wildflower: Stories, and editor of several volumes of poetry, essays, and stories.

Telling stories as a radio host, then as a costumed tour guide, Sara Sheckells followed a career path into academia before her love of the literary pulled her back to the mic. Her narration style has been described as sophisticated, smooth, and smart. A New England native, Sara lives north of Boston with her family.