At Home on St. Simons

Here, for the first time outside the pages of a small Island newspaper called Georgia’s Coastal Illustrated, Eugenia shares with her worldwide reading public, some of what life was like during the first years in which she and her best friend and fellow writer, Joyce Blackburn, were becoming Islanders. These short pieces, Genie says, include my observations day by day of what it was like, at last, to be at home on St. Simons. We were learning how to be neighbors, after so many years of complex life in the huge northern city of Chicago; learning how to care deeply for people with whom, at first glance, we had little in common. We were understanding what it really meant to have come home.

Eugenia Price, called by many St. Simons’ own beloved invader, tells you here about those early years as they were being lived. Her St. Simons Memoir, cherished by thousands, was written from memory and notes in old desk calendars, but At Home on St. Simonsas they occurred.

More than fourteen million people have read Eugenia Price’s books which have been translated into fifteen languages. Much of the magic these millions remember so vividly years after the reading, began in the simple, sad, joyous, and absorbing events related to this singular volume.

Never before published is a brand new opening chapter, in which Ms. Price attempts to explain-almost as to herself-why, in the face of such drastic change on the once provincial little coastal island, she is still at home on St. Simons. Her readers do not have to see the Island firsthand, to recognize their own response to her sense of place.