Leaving Cold Sassy : The Unfinished Sequel to Cold Sassy Tree. She is survived by a son, John Andrew Sparks of Colorado Springs, Colo., and a daughter, Rebecca Marie Sparks of Atlanta, and a brother and two sisters. Olive Ann Burns was 59 when she published her first and only book, Cold Sassy Tree, which became an instant classic in 1986. The following titles by Olive Ann Burns are held by the Hargrett Library: Cold Sassy Tree. Miss Burns studied at Mercer University and was graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. What I was after (in interviews) was not just names and dates I wanted stories and details that would bring the dead to life.” “I don’t face life looking backwards, but I have written about past times and past people. “It has been said that growing up in the South and becoming a writer is like spending your life riding in a wagon, seated in a chair that is always facing backwards,” Miss Burns said. Buy a discounted Paperback of A Study Guide for Olive Ann. To create the novel, Miss Burns played journalist, interviewing her parents, aunts and cousins. Booktopia has A Study Guide for Olive Ann Burnss Cold Sassy Tree by Cengage Learning Gale.

The town of “Cold Sassy” was modeled on the actual small town of Commerce where her father had grown up. Miss Burns modeled the grandfather character and his May-December romance in her novel on her great-grandfather, who had married a young storekeeper three weeks after his first wife’s death. If you can’t vacuum and you can’t go anywhere, you have more time than you ever knew existed.” Then, when I was on chemotherapy, the hematologist told me I couldn’t go anywhere. “I had a head start on giving up things the doctor I went to about arthritis said I shouldn’t vacuum anymore. “You must decide what you will give up in order to have the time and energy to do it,” she said. Many would-be authors never complete books, she observed, because they never make the time to write. Miss Burns had written nonfiction articles for several years, first for Atlanta Weekly, a former Sunday magazine of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and later as a free-lance writer and advice columnist for the Atlanta Constitution. Olive Ann Burns was a professional writer, journalist, and columnist for most of her life.

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