Dorothea Benton Frank

DOROTHEA BENTON FRANK

In 1995, Dorothea Benton Frank hadn't written one word of fiction. A wife, mother and nationally recognized fundraiser and advocate for the arts, education and women's issues, Dorothea (Dottie to friends) "always seemed to be the one that ended up writing the newsletter," she said in a 2000 interview. But then Dottie's mother died, and the Benton's South Carolina Lowcountry home, in the family for a hundred years, was sold.

"All of a sudden, I had lost my mother, and my sense of place," she recalled. "Then I really started to write." Before long, Dottie's catharsis had yielded seven hundred pages, a semi-autobiographical, multi-generational yarn set on Dottie's home turf of Sullivan's Island in South Carolina. Through a friend in advertising, she met Fern Michaels, who also hailed from the Lowcountry; impressed with the manuscript, the popular romance novelist helped Dottie revise the draft and find an agent. "I didn't know anything about the publishing industry . . . [or] how it worked." Although her agent was also inexperienced, the manuscript sold within a week to Penguin/Jove, one of the country's largest publishers, who ordered an amazing initial print-run of 525,000 copies.

Emboldened, Dottie sought out Southern authors to read her galleys--and hopefully provide endorsements to print on the back cover of her debut. By the time of its 2000 release, Sullivan's Island: A Lowcountry Tale boasted enthusiastic recommendations from Michaels, Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides), Anne Rivers Siddons (Peachtree Road) and John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden of Evil. Publishers Weekly anointed the book "the debut of an exquisitely talented writer," and readers agreed, making it a New York Times bestseller. A year later, acclaimed sophomore effort Plantation followed suit.

The breakout star considers her third Lowcountry tale, this month's Isle of Palms her favorite. "I like the range of the characters," she says at her website. "Persnickety old ladies, rebellious children, unmarried adults, wild and crazy neighbors . . . very much like folks I've known all my life . . . the heart of this story is about loyalty and that's something I value greatly."

Although she's quickly become a part of the great tradition of Southern fiction, Dottie hasn't lived below the Mason-Dixon line since 1973. After a year in San Francisco, she arrived in New York City, intending to stay for a year and then "come home and marry some good old boy, you know, drink beer for the rest of my life and eat oysters, I guess, and it just didn't happen like that."

Instead, she met her husband, a businessman based in New Jersey, where the couple and their two children now live. "I live here for love. I married a Yankee," she said.