About Sally Wolff King, PhD

Dr. Sally Wolff King is Woodruff Health Sciences Center Historian Emerita at Emory University, and she teaches “Literature and Medicine” in the Emory University School of Medicine. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt University (1976) and is an alumna of the Laney Graduate School of Emory University (MA, 1979, PhD, in English, 1983).

Sally Wolff King has published in the area of Southern Literature, Emory history, and Emory medical history. Her work on Southern Literature has produced five published books, the most recent of which is William Faulkner in Holly Springs, (University Press of Mississippi, March, 2025).

Wolff-King has served in both teaching and administrative roles for over forty-five years at Emory. She taught in the Department of English for thirty years and concurrently served for twenty years in the Emory administration as assistant and associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and assistant vice president in the Office of the President.

Her previous works include: A Dark Rose: Love in Eudora Welty’s Stories and Novels (Wolff, LSU Press, January, 2015). Her book on William Faulkner titled: Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Diary (Wolff, LSU Press, 2010), garnered national attention and has been called “one of the most exciting literary finds in recent history” and “a major discovery in Faulkner scholarship.” This book generated twenty-one invited speaking engagements around the country including the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and the William J. Clinton Presidential Center.

She is also the author of Talking About William Faulkner (1996) and co-editor of Southern Mothers: Fact and Fiction in Southern Women’s Writing (1999), both with LSU Press. Wolff-King knew Ms. Eudora Welty personally and shared with her a nineteen-year literary friendship.

In the medical history arena, she recently co-edited: “The Smartest and Most Promising:” A History of the Emory University School of Medicine (Bookhouse Group, September, 2023). She edited To the Ultimate Good: A History of the Emory University Clinic (Bookhouse Group, Inc., October, 2019) and was co-editor of The Enduring Legacy of James Edgar Paullin, MD (Bookhouse Group, Inc., 2021). With University Historian Gary S. Hauk, she co-edited an Emory history titled Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: The Emerging Life of Emory University (Hauk and King, Bookhouse Group, August, 2010).