Daughter of Thomas Jefferson Bottoms and Cora Talula Gilbert Bottoms. (Tenth child of twelve children)

Mollie Ruth earned honors in high school and college. She finished Florence State Normal School in Alabama where she was Valedictorian, received a degree from Peabody College in 1927, earned an M.A. degree from Peabody College in 1929, and undertook further graduate studies in Creative Writing from Peabody and the Univeristy of Iowa. She taught at Peabody College and Central State University in Oklahoma and became a published poet and essayist, a member of International Who's Who in Poetry, and a gifted teacher of poets. Perhaps the high point of her academic career was persuading Robert Frost to visit the Edmond Campus of Oklahoma Univerity (where she taught) for a lecture and seminar with her poetry classes in 1939. It was Mollie Ruth who encouraged her mother, Talula, to write about the old times. When she began to encourage her mother to write about her early times, it was in part because Mollie Ruth planned to write a novel based on her parents' lives. She took a leave of absence in 1939 to begin writing the novel, but left the writing when the United States entered World War II. In 1940, she returned to Fayette County, Georgia, to finish research for the unpublished novel, "Taproots." Although completed in 1943, the manuscript was never published. When Molly Ruth's decision to publish her novel began to waver, her mother, Talula, gathered up the notes she had given her daughter and sat down to write her own story. These were ultimately published by Nancilu Burdick in 1983 as "Autobiography of Talula Gilbert Bottoms."
(Information compiled by W. Joseph Stell, Stell & Gilbert Families)