Sophie Kerr, child of the Eastern Shore and writer of popular romances, could not have known the effect she would have on the lives of so many writers who would come after her.
How could the woman who wrote 23 novels (titles like Stay Out of My Life, Cora Goes On and Love Story Incidental) -- and more than 100 short stories -- have known the legacy she would create when she left $510,878 to Washington College in Chestertown?
How could she have known her endowment would skyrocket to $2.3 million today and come to fund the largest undergraduate literary prize in the nation?
Could Sophie Kerr ever have imagined students at Washington College would one day speak to an oil painting of her in the library and call her "Saint Sophie" -- despite the fact that she graduated from Hood College in Frederick?
Kerr died of a heart attack in 1965, at the age of 84, and bequeathed much of her estate to the small private college where, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, she received an honorary degree in 1942. Kerr's will specified that one half of the income her bequest generated be used to buy books and bring writers to the campus. The other half, it said, should "be used annually as a cash prize to be known and designated as the Sophie Kerr Prize, to be awarded to the senior student, at graduation, who shall have been chosen as having the best ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor."
In the three decades since Christina (Clark) Rohde was called to a professor's house a few nights before commencement in 1968 and told she'd won $9,000, 35 other young writers have received checks, the largest of which -- $65,522 -- was given to Sarah Blackman in 2002.
Many spent the prize on travels to Europe. Many bought motorcycles, cars or furniture, and many used the money to pay for graduate school or make a down payment on a first house or cover the bills while they attempted to earn a living as a writer. Only one used a portion to buy herself a Leonard Rosoman painting, and only one to pay blues singer Big Joe Turner to sing at his wedding reception.
Of the writers who have won the Sophie Kerr Prize, one has published a novel, and two a collection of short stories. More have published books of poetry, but only one, 2000 winner Christine Lincoln, has gone on to literary fame.
