Books

Published in 2016, Maritime Magistery is a collection of linked stories, which take place on North Carolina’s coast, and reveal how the environment can impact both one’s spirit and the workings of the subconscious.
Read an excerpt here.

Published in 2013, Walking with Moonshine: My Life in Stories is a collection of stories written across Lucy Daniels’ life from age 15 to 79.

Dreaming Your Way to Creative Freedom: A Two-Mirror Liberation Process was published in 2005. Dreaming your way to creative freedom is not easy, but with patience and focus on your creative products, your life history, and your dreams, such power is possible. As Lucy Daniels shows the landmarks, personal symbols, and specific outcomes of her 30-year struggle against writer’s block, she also offers a road map for others to use on their journeys.

Also published in 2005, The Eyes of the Father, was Lucy Daniels’ first novel in over 40 years following a debilitating writer’s block. This novel is about a small child in Los Angeles, blue-eyed, red-haired, black-skinned Lily Price, daughter of a flamboyant white musician and a beautiful black singer, who glories in the delight her father shows for her and her strikingly “special” appearance. But when tragedy brings Lily and her mother back east to the rigidly conservative home of her fundamentalist minister grandfather in Millboro, North Carolina, “special” is viewed as “freak.” Lily’s emotional response to this loss is only one of several with which this story demonstrates the power the past wields over the present.
Read an excerpt here.

With a Woman’s Voice: A Writer’s Struggle for Emotional Freedom (2002), was a major breakthrough for Lucy Daniels. It chronicles her life from an emotionally distressed childhood that led to chronic anorexia and a long-standing writer’s block. Finally free from past demons and the unreasonable demands of a socially powerful family, Daniels told her life story with insight, humor and compassion.

Caleb, My Son was published in 1956 and was Lucy Daniels’ first novel. Released less than a year after her discharge from a mental hospital where she’d been for five years due to anorexia nervosa, Caleb became a best-seller and was published in multiple languages. This novel, written while she was in the mental hospital, is a disturbing drama of the South depicting a father-son conflict intensified by racial inequality and clashing standards of heritage and justice.

In 1961, Lucy Daniels published High on a Hill. It was the result of her receiving a Guggenheim fellowship at age 22, the youngest Guggenheim fellowship recipient to-date. This novel is a fictionalized account of the life struggles of patients and doctors inside a mental hospital. Inspired by Daniels’ own experience —she was hospitalized in the 1950’s while suffering from anorexia nervosa—High on a Hill dares to expose the troubled lives of both the patients and their caretakers.
Read an excerpt here.