Ernest Seeman (1887-1979), the son of Henry Ernest and Bettie Albright Seeman, was a writer, publisher, and editor who lived in Durham, North Carolina, and in Unicoi County, near Erwin, Tennessee.
Seeman was hired to manage the Duke University Press in 1925 after serving as president of the family business, Seeman Printery Company of Durham, from 1917 to 1923. He helped expand the Press's catalogue of titles and was associate editor of a new psychological journal, Character and Personality . Seeman began writing while at Duke, publishing several essays in general interest and psychology magazines. Known as a campus radical, Seeman was fired in 1934 when he was accused of writing a satire on the Duke administration.
Seeman and his second wife, Elizabeth Brickel Seeman, settled in a primitive cabin in Tennessee in the early 1940s. For the next thirty-five years, Ernest Seeman wrote constantly as he and his wife battled poverty and, sometimes, near-starvation. He worked frequently on his book, Tobacco Town, which was published as American Gold in 1978. He also worked on several other novels and numerous essays. The Seemans founded a lending library for community children in 1965. Seeman died in Tennessee in 1979.
From the guide to the Ernest Seeman Papers, ., 1930-1975, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)
