Julia Mood Peterkin was born to Dr. and Mrs. Julius Mood in Laurens, South Carolina. Her mother died when she was a few months old. Her father returned to Sumter, South Carolina, with his children who were then reared by a grandfather and a nanny. At age 16, Peterkin graduated from Converse College and returned the next year for her M.A. degree. She specialized in music. Several years later she married William G. Peterkin, a large planter at Fort Motte, South Carolina. Isolated on Lang Syne plantation with her husband and son and the plantation workers, she recorded stories, supersitions, and customs of plantation life. Each week she traveled to Columbia for piano lessons under Dr. Bellamon who was also a literary critic and poet. He was fascinated by her story telling and her handling of the difficult Gullah dialect and insisted that she write her plantation stories.

She wrote in a one-room cabin some hundreds of feet from the "big house." Her work was submitted to H.L. Mencken whose criticisms were very positive. She published a number of stories and two books before she received the Pulitzer Prize for her third book, Scarlet Sister Mary, in 1928. She was acclaimed by critics as one of the best writers on plantation life. Her other books were Green Thursday (1924), Black April (1927), Bright Skin (1932), and Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933). Mrs. Peterkin died August 1961, age 80, in Orangeburg Memorial Hospital.