An engaging and enchanting journey into a world of letters that will inspire and edify all those who love writing.

–Jerome Groopman, MD,

Recanati Professor, Harvard Medical School, coauthor with Dr. Pamela Hartzband, Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What is Right for You.

Beverly Mayne Kienzle grew up surrounded by papers and manuscripts containing the remarkable writings of her grandmother Virginia Cary Hudson Cleveland, still unpublished at her death in 1954. Beverly’s mother, Virginia Cleveland Mayne, devoted herself to publishing those works.

That manuscript, O Ye Jigs and Juleps!, sold for $2.50 and made its first–of sixty-six–appearances on the New York Times Best Sellers list on May 27, 1962, and three other books followed. Kienzle now returns to her roots and tells the story her mother started but never finished, the biography of Virginia Cary Hudson, a girl who grew up preaching.

In this authoritative biography, Virginia Cary Hudson, Kienzle recounts the career and family life of Virginia Cary Hudson. With warmth and humor, she reveals her grandmother’s incisive observations of humankind, from simple folk to big-time gamblers, in places from Kentucky to Havana and Las Vegas. The letters and the scrapbook Beverly’s grandmother completed for her, with its charming poems and drawings, appear in print for the first time, as does the narrative that Beverly’s mother began in order to tell the poignant story of publishing a best seller.