Frances Gray Patton said that she could hardly remember a time when she didn't consider herself a writer. The daughter of a journalist, she was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her parents read so much to young Frances and her two brothers that they always felt most comfortable with a book in their hands. She had her first success as a writer when, in high school, her short story won first place in a national contest. She continued writing while she attended Trinity College (now Duke University) and later the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was an active member of the Carolina Playmakers. While she was a student at UNC, she wrote a play, "The Beaded Buckle," and later received a Playmaker Fellowship for her acting.

In the years following her marriage to Dr. Lewis Patton, a professor at Duke University, she focused her energies on raising their three children, a son, Robert Gray, and twin daughters, Mary MacRae and Susannah Garrison. As her children grew older, she began writing again and submitting stories for publication. An early story, "A Piece of Bread," published in The Kenyon Review, won second place in a national competition and was included in the 1944 O. Henry Memorial Award Stories. Her best known work, the novel Good Morning, Miss Dove, expanded from a short story entitled "The Terrible Miss Dove," appeared as a series of short stories in The Ladies' Home Journal. The collected tales of an eccentric North Carolina schoolteacher and her students won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the best work of fiction as well as the Christopher Award in 1955, and became the basis for a popular movie of the same name.

Despite the success of this novel, Mrs. Patton's first love was always the short story. Her stories appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, primarily in The New Yorker. A collection of her short fiction, The Finer Things of Life, was published in 1951 and in 1953 won the annual Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the best fiction published by a North Carolinian. She won the award again in 1956 for A Piece of Luck, published in 1955.

Orville Prescott said of Frances Gray Patton in The New York Times, "With sure skill and smooth technical dexterity, with serene wisdom and rippling humor, Mrs. Patton tells stories about 'nice people' she knows. These are gentle stories, calm, witty, humorous and urbane. Nothing dreadful or revolting happens in any of them. Nevertheless, Mrs. Patton knows as much about the South and reports it as truly as any devotee of doom and decay." Richard Walser, in Literary North Carolina, said, "Frances Gray Patton wrote of urban dwellers in the towns and small cities of North Carolina. ...[Her] style is precise and disingenuous, her point of view ironic."

While continuing to write, Mrs. Patton also inspired many young writers, teaching creative writing at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1970 and in 1990, the R. Hunt Parker Memorial Award for lifetime contributions to the literary heritage of North Carolina.

Excerpt from Good Morning, Miss Dove
Dodd, Mead and Company, 1954

Miss Dove watched him go, but her mind watched two small boys who had long since departed from Cedar Grove. She had come on those lads at the drinking fountain. (They’d had no business at the fountain; it was their library period. But the librarian was lax.) They had been discussing her. “I bet Miss Dove could lick Joe Louis,” one of them had said. “Who? That old stick?” the other one had jeered. “I could beat her with my little finger!” He had glanced up to see Miss Dove looking down at him. She had looked at him for a long time. Her gray eyes were expressionless. The tip of her long nose was pink, but no pinker than normal. At last she had spoken. “Thomas Baker,” she had said in the tone of one making a pure observation, “you talk too much, don’t you?” “Yes, ma’am,” Thomas had said in a tiny voice. He had gone off without getting any water. For a long time afterwards he sweated when he thought of the incident. He could not know that Miss Dove remembered too. But she did. Ever since Pearl Harbor Miss Dove had been troubled. She lived quite alone, for her sisters were married by then and her mother was dead, and one evening while she was correcting papers she sensed, with that uncanny extra-perception of the teacher, that something had intruded upon her solitude. She looked quickly about her sitting-room. A curtain rustled in a puff of breeze; her grandmother’s whatnot cast a grotesque shadow on the polished floor; a finger of lamplight picked out a gold title on one of her father’s old brown travel books. There was nothing else. But the red correction pencil shook in her fingers; for a moment her throat constricted in a spasm of desolate, unaccountable grief and a conviction of her own unworthiness. Miss Dove had never before felt unworthy in all her life. After that the thing happened frequently, until at last she saw who the intruders were. They were the children she had taught long ago. War had scattered those children. There was a girl—a vain, silly little piece she had been—who was a nurse on Corregidor. At least, when last heard of she had been on Corregidor. One of the boys was dead in Tunisia. Others were on the Anzio beachhead, or in the jungles of New Guinea, or in the flak-brightened sky over Germany. But they came back to Miss Dove. She saw them as they had been at seven, at ten, at twelve. Only they had a beauty she had not seen in them then. They lifted their faces like starry morning flowers. Their limbs quivered with the unreasoned joy of childhood. And then, as Miss Dove looked at them, they grew still. Their faces paled. They clasped their little hands. They faded and were gone.

The Finer Things of Life. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951.

Good Morning, Miss Dove. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954.

A Piece of Luck. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955.

Twenty-Eight Stories. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969.

Ms. Patton was also a frequent contributor to periodicals, including Harper's, Holiday, Kenyon Review, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, New Yorker, Redbook, and Seventeen.

Additional information on Ms. Patton can be found in:

Tributes to Frances Gray Patton in Pembroke Magazine, No. 14, 1982.