Eccentric Southern writer Florence King hates people, preferring smoking, drinking, handling firearms,and anything else that she isn't
Born in 1936 in Washington, D.C., into an old Virginia family, Florence King comes by her eccentricity honestly. Her mother, Louise, began smoking at the age of eight, and dropped out of high school to become a telephone operator and indulge her passion for softball. Her father, an English expatriate, was the trombone player in a jazz band and a quiet, bookish man. Living with them was her maternal grandmother, the ultimate in Southern Ladyhood, who tried to mold Florence into femininity.
King was a rebel from the start. She hated being a child, and hated other children. She was far ahead of her peers in intelligence, and found it hard to relate to them. She was an agnostic who called her father by his first name, Herb. When she acted up in school, her grandmother was mortified, her father ignored it, and her mother defended her to the teachers, often in profane terms.
In college, King slept with both men and woman, including a male professor. She joined a sorority and was thrown out when she confessed her lesbianism. She trained at the Women Officer Candidate School in Quantico to become a Marine, but dropped out. She attended the University of Mississippi in Oxford. There she fell in love with a young woman who was later killed in a car accident, and began writing articles for true romance magazines and Cosmopolitan.
In 1975, King published "Southern Ladies and Gentleman," a scathing look at Dixie that included descriptions of the 57 types of Good Ol' Boys. She followed up with "Lump it or Leave It" and "Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye," both collections of essays and both quite successful. She writes an extremely popular column for the conservative magazine National Review, "The Misanthrope's Corner," in which she extols the pleasures of smoking, drinking, and packing heat. She often refuses to go places where she cannot bring her gun. Refusing to be pigeonholed, King describes herself as a "conservative lesbian feminist." Her grandmother did manage to teach her some manners, however, for she says, "No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street."
