Prince, William Meade, 1893-1951

William Meade Prince (9 July 1893-10 November 1951) was born in Roanoke, Va. and lived in Chapel Hill with his parents and grandfather, Episcopal rector Dr. William Meade, from age five to fifteen. Prince then moved to Birmingham, Ala., to work for a short time. He studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, 1913-1915, and, upon winning a contest sponsored by Collier's magazine, began his career as a magazine and book illustrator. Prince illustrated stories for magazines such as Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Red Book, and Cosmopolitan . He also produced illustrations for the work of authors such as James Street, Philip Wylie, Kathleen Norris, William Saroyan, and Arnold Bennet. He was noted for his illustrations of the stories of Roark Bradford, and, among other advertising assignments, did a long-running advertising campaign for Dodge cars.

After moving to Chapel Hill with his wife, Lillian Hughes Prince (17 June 1893-25 February 1962), whom he met while in Birmingham, Ala., and married in 1915, Prince became involved with acting. During this time, he remained active as an illustrator and taught in the Art Department of the University of North Carolina. He also produced The Southern Part of Heaven (1950), the best-selling memoir of his childhood. During World War II, Prince was for a time as acting head of the University of North Carolina Art Department and also did drawings and posters for the Committee to Defend America, the American Field Hospital Corps, and the USO.

Lillian Hughes Prince had been active with the Westport Players when she lived in Westport, Conn., and had studied acting with Harry Irvine at the Academy of Allied Art in New York City. From the 1930s until her death in 1962, she had parts in many Carolina Playmakers productions, including The House of Connelly by Paul Green, The Little Foxes, Ah, Wilderness!, Our Town, The Madwoman of Chaillot, Showboat, Oklahoma, and Spring For Sure . Prince performed in Blithe Spirit with the Raleigh Little Theater and shortly afterwards joined the cast of Howard Richardson's Dark of the Moon with the Schubert national touring company, where she had the role of the cunjer woman during the 1945-1946 season. Prince also performed in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas ( Patience, Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore ) and held the role of Queen Elizabeth in Paul Green's outdoor drama The Lost Colony during the summers from 1947 through 1953.

William Prince also acted in some of the plays in which his wife was involved, including Ah, Wilderness!, Blithe Spirit, and The Lost Colony, in which he played Ananias Dare. After the success of The Southern Part of Heaven, which he also illustrated, Prince began working on two other books. One was to be a record of a trip that he and Lillian made out West. Prince was working on the other project, apparently a sequel to his boyhood memoirs, when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Chapel Hill home in November 1951. Lillian Prince died in New York in 1962. The couple had one adopted daughter Caroline, who returned to her biological parents in 1941. Both William and Lillian Prince are buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery.

From the guide to the William Meade Prince and Lillian Hughes Prince Papers (#3660), 1890s-1962, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)