Doris Betts was born in Statesville, North Carolina in 1932, the only child of William Elmore and Mary Ellen Waugh. In 1950 she graduated from Statesville High School, and attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While an undergraduate student she married then law student Lowry Betts, who later became a district judge in Chatham and Orange Counties, North Carolina. They have three children. She won the Mademoiselle College Fiction contest during her sophomore year (1953) for the story “Mr. Shawn and Father Scott.”

After working as a newspaper reporter for a number of years, she joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1966. She received the UNC Putnam Book Prize in 1954 for her first book, The Gentle Insurrection, three Sir Walter Raleigh Awards (1958, 1965, and 1973) for the best fiction books by a North Carolinian, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Writing (1958—59), the North Carolina Award and Medal (1975), the Distinguished Service Award for Women (Chi Omega), and the John Dos Passos Award from Longwood College. She has also written articles for professional journals, lectured at writers' conferences, and delivered speeches on major college campuses.

In 1980 she was named a UNC Alumni Distinguished Professor of English. She received the Tanner Award for distinguished undergraduate teaching in 1973 and the Katherine Carmichael Teaching Award in 1980.

"The Ugliest Pilgrim," the most widely printed of her stories, became an Academy Award winner as a short film entitled "Violet," and in 1998 was the basis of a musical that won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Coinciding with her retirement from teaching, an endowed chair was named in her honor, The Doris Betts Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing. (The first Betts Professor is Pam Durban, who joined UNC in 2000). Betts has also served as the Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Short stories

• The Gentle Insurrection (1954)
• The Astronomer and Other Stories (1966)
• Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories (1973)

Novels

• Tall Houses in Winter (1957)
• The Scarlet Thread (1965)
• The River to Pickle Beach (1972)
• Heading West: a novel (1981)
• Souls Raised from the Dead (1994)
• The Sharp Teeth of Love (1998)

• Doris Betts: Journey into the Grand Canyon of the Soul, audio essay on Bookpod

Doris Betts