On the property of Life Center Ministries on Mount Vernon Road in Sandy Springs, Georgia is a historic home that originally belonged to the Ware family. You can best see the small home by pulling into the church parking lot. The property was purchased by publisher Norman Berg in 1938 to use for hunting. He was the Southeast representative for MacMillan Publishers.
Berg later sold all but five acres, remodeled the barn, and made that his home. He used the old Ware home as a guest house, letting authors stay there when a quiet place in the country would help them with their writing.
The W. N. Ware home, circa 1876, is identified as a historic home by Dunwoody Preservation Trust. The home is actually just over the line in Fulton County, which means it is in the city of Sandy Springs, Georgia. The home, barn and land were bought by Norman Berg in 1938. He let authors use the cottage to work on their writing.
In Pat Conroy’s “My Reading Life,” he talks about his favorite books and the time in his life that he discovered them. Some of those books come from his association with Norman Berg. He tells the story of Norman Berg inviting him to stay at the cottage on his property, which Berg called Sellanraa.
Conroy describes arriving at Sellanraa. “The Bergs lived on fifteen well-tended acres bordered by a forest of oaks and pines that gave them the illusion of having escaped the land rush that had consumed the Atlanta suburbs. Inside the house was a great room with a flagstone floor, a massive rock fireplace, and a library of five thousand books near the door to Norman’s warren of offices.”
“Julie and I would like to offer this as an office to complete your novel,” Berg suggested as he showed Conroy the separate old two-bedroom farmhouse. Conroy wanted to pay his publisher for the time he spent there, but Berg replied, “Complete your novel and that will be payment enough.”
“The Great Santini” is based on Conroy’s life growing up with his tyrannical father and became a movie in 1979 starring Robert Duvall in the role of the father. Conroy wrote “Death of Santini” many years later to explain more about his relationship with his father and how it changed over the years.
In November of 2013, Pat Conroy appeared at Marcus Jewish Community Center in Dunwoody as part of their Book Festival. He was promoting his new book, “Death of Santini.” I intentionally attended the event as a fan of his writing and to verify that he wrote “The Great Santini” at Sellanraa. The Ware/Berg cottage and Marcus Jewish Community Center are just 1.4 miles apart.
Following Pat Conroy’s presentation at MJCC, I took my place in a long line along with many other fans to get his autograph on a couple of books. As I approached the table and presented my two books, I asked “Is it true that you wrote some of ‘The Great Santini’ in an old historic home near here that was owned by Norman Berg?” Pat Conroy looked directly at me and responded, “I wrote most of ‘The Great Santini’ in that house.” Then he asked of I was a writer, to which I gave a tongue-tied answer and then had to move on to make way for the next autograph seeker.
I haven’t found any confirmation that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings ever stayed in the cottage. There are many letters on record between Rawlings and Berg. The letters are held at The University of Georgia Library, but several appear in a book titled Selected Letters of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, by Gordon E. Bigelow and Laura V. Monti. Also, Conroy mentions their relationship in My Reading Life. He tells of celebrating his completion of The Great Santini with dinner and hunting for squirrels at Sellanraa, where Berg confided about his relationship with Rawlings. Conroy remembers Berg confiding that she was the “the great love of his life,” and “he had become a nightmare in her life and he now believed she could’ve written several more books if she’d never met him.”
In an article titled Norman Berg: The Book Rep Behind Great Southern Writers, Bob Vickrey says of Berg, he was instrumental in the writer’s (Pat Conroy) success early in his career. Berg was Vickrey’s mentor as a new publishers rep. “In previous decades, he had also been a pivotal influence in the careers of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Margaret Mitchell.”
As to the story of Margaret Mitchell, Norman Berg was a family friend of the Mitchell family. He had a role in her publication of “Gone With the Wind,” but the book was published in 1936 and he bought the Ware property in 1938, a timeline that doesn’t fit with her staying in the cottage.
Vickrey says Berg “had been an instrumental figure in the publication of Gone with the Wind in 1936—not a bad legacy for a guy whose job description was ‘book salesman.’” The story goes that Berg took her manuscript on a camping trip and read it by flashlight in the night. He awoke the others who were asleep to tell them “he had just read a masterful work.”
The little cottage in Sandy Springs is already historic based on when it was built and the pioneer Ware family story, but the later ownership by Norman Berg and knowing that famous authors considered the home a sanctuary for writing adds extra historical significance.