Odyssey of a Wandering Mind

“Sara Mayfield leaves the reader unsure what is fact and what is fiction, and our experience ultimately mirrors hers in provocative ways. She peeks at us alluringly through Horne's lucid prose—as an author, an inventor, and maybe even as a government agent.”—Kathryn McKee, author of Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South

"Montgomery, Alabama, in the early Twentieth Century was an enigma where powerful white men defended the final redoubt of male privilege and the South's romantic past while a generation of women chiseled away the foundation on which male hegemony rested. Sara Mayfield, Tallulah Bankhead, Sara Haardt (Mencken), and Zelda Sayre ((Fitzgerald) lived near each other growing up in Montgomery, graduated to notable careers in theater or as writers who defied conservative social conventions and charted their own lives. Odyssey of a Wandering Mind is an excellent starting place in pursuit of what it meant to strong-minded Alabama women a century ago to be a woman. And the dangers to which that independence exposed them."—Wayne Flynt, author of Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives

"With Odyssey of a Wandering Mind, Jennifer Horne brings out of obscurity an Alabama talent often regarded as a supporting player to her more famous friends, Sara Haardt Mencken and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Sara Mayfield was so much more than a biographer of the Southern belles of her generation who chafed against being known merely as “the wife of” their literary-lion husbands. By turns a novelist, playwright, journalist, and an inventor, Mayfield was first and foremost a survivor who led a remarkable life throughout a near century of culture upheaval. Horne does a phenomenal job of humanizing a figure who for decades battled her demons to find her greatest success in her mid-sixties, long after Haardt and Sayre has passed prematurely." —Kirk Curnutt, co-editor with Sara A. Kosiba of The Romance of Regionalism in the Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise