Prieur Jay Higginbotham Papers

Prieur Jay Higginbotham was born on July 16, 1937 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the eldest of three children born to Prieur Jay Higginbotham, Sr. and Vivian Inez Perez Higginbotham. His siblings are a sister, Mary Kay (born June 13, 1940) and a brother, Robert Dale (born December 29, 1943).

Jay Higginbotham was educated in the Pascagoula city schools, and upon graduation, he entered the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, Mississippi, receiving the Bachelor of Arts in 1960. During his college years (1955 - 1960), he served as an Assistant Clerk in the Mississippi House of Representatives.

After graduating from Ole Miss, he taught high school, first in Mississippi, then in the Mobile County, Alabama Public Schools from 1962 until 1972. During that time, he married, and he and his wife, Louisa, now have three children --Jeanne, Denis, and Robert. In the same time period, he began to pursue a career as an author. The ensuing years saw Higginbotham evolve into a writer of history, novels, short stories, travel, adventure, family biographies, and articles for newspapers and historical journals. Among his books are "The Mobile Indians; Pascagoula: Singing River City; Mobile: City By the Bay; Fort Maurepas: The Birth of Louisiana; Fast Train Russia; Autumn in Petrischevo; and Old Mobile".

Higginbotham is known for his narrative style of writing, which makes his books infinitely more readable than most scholarly works. His books have been widely acclaimed in the United States, France, Britain, and Spain. In 1966, "Old Mobile" won five literary awards.

It is no coincidence that five of Higginbotham's books deal with the French Colonial Period. His ancestors were predominantly French, and from an early age, he exhibited an abiding interest in the history of the United States Gulf Coast.

An extensive genealogical study of his family revealed that one ancestor, Joseph Simon Sieur de la Pointe, helped erect Fort Maurepas, on the east coast of Biloxi (Mississippi) Bay in 1699. Other ancestors were prominent political figures of the Gulf Coast area, including at least two mayors of New Orleans, Louisiana during the eighteenth century. Family pride is reflected in the handing down of names -- Jay and all of his children were given old family names.

In 1966, as a young, unattached school teacher, Higginbotham traveled to the (then) Soviet Union. While there, he rode the Trans-Siberian Main Line from Nakhodka (a port city on the east coast of Siberia, which borders the Sea of Japan) to Moscow, keeping a journal as he traveled. The journal lay dormant until about 1979, when a chance meeting with a Soviet citizen rekindled his interest. Soviet author, Lev Knjazev, visited the Mobile Public Library, where Higginbotham was employed, in search of books by Russian authors. The two men became so involved in a discussion of Higginbotham's trip through Siberia, that Higginbotham invited the other man to his home for dinner. Encouraged by the Soviet author, he began to write a book based on his journal. He continued his acquaintance with Knjazev, who had returned to his home in Vladivostok (in the former Soviet Union), and made five or six attempts to send him the manuscript for his perusal. However, it was lost in the mail each time, and he finally hit upon the idea of sending the manuscript one page at a time, in his letters. This plan proved viable, and Knjazev gave his enthusiastic approval, urging Higginbotham to complete the project. The result was "Fast Train Russia".

In 1984, he visited the Soviet Union for a second time, and wrote "Autumn in Petrischevo", based on that experience. He was impressed by the honesty and goodwill of the Soviet people, whose uppermost desire, according to Higginbotham, was to "... safeguard peace and avert nuclear war."

In 1973, Higginbotham applied for the position of Director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, but was passed over in favor of Mr. Elbert Hilliard, who remains in that position at this writing. In that same year, he secured employment at the Mobile Public Library, serving as Head of the Department of Local History between 1973 and 1978, and as acting Head of Special Collections from 1979 to 1980. Since 1980, he has acted as a research consultant for the library.

During his tenure at the Mobile Public Library, he assisted in the establishment of the Mobile Municipal Archives, becoming Director thereof in 1983. At this writing, Mr. Higginbotham resides in Mobile, and remained Director of the Mobile Municipal Archives until 2001. He also serves on the editorial board of the "Gulf Coast Historical Review". His works have been distributed to over 125 countries and translated into more than 20 languages.