Ted M. Dunagan

Georgia Connections

• Monticello, Jasper County

Notes of Interest

Ted Dunagan is the prize-winning author of two novels who was named 2009 "Georgia Author of the Year" in the young adult book category. Retired after 26 years in the cosmetics industry, he lives in Monticello, GA. In 2010, his novel "A Yellow Watermelon" was chosen for inclusion on the Georgia Center for the Book's inaugural list of "25 Books All Young Georgians Should Read."

Ted Dunagan was born in Coffeeville, Alabama, in 1943. He graduated from Clark County High School in Grove Hill, Alabama in 1961, served in the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne division during the Vietnam War, and attended Georgia State University in Atlanta. He retired after 26 years in sales and marketing for Chanel, Inc. and turned to writing books for young readers from his home in Monticello, Georgia. He also writes a weekly column for the Monticello News called "I'm Fixin' To" and covers the crime and high school sports beats for the newspaper.

Dunagan writes that he has long been an admirer of Mark Twain, whom he calls "my literary hero." After reading "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" sometime around 1955, he said he resolved to become a writer. "I wanted to write after I graduated from high school, but Uncle Sam had other plans for me. After the military there was college, then a job, then marriage, then kids, then a career to properly support all four of them. All this time, over the years, in the back of my mind the yearning was still there."

He began writing in 2002 and published his first book, "A Yellow Watermelon," in 2007. It is the story, set in the rural Alabama of the author's youth in the late 1940s, about two young boys, one black and the other white, who become ftriends despite the racial divide of the era. Dunagan was honored as the "Georgia Author of the Year" after that debut novel appeared. His second novel for young readers, "Secrets of the Satilfa," was a sequel published in 2010 and continued the story of the two Alabama boys.