Burns worked for the
Atlanta Journal and wrote under the
pseudonym "Amy Larkin". She married Andy Sparks, a fellow journalist. In 1971 Burns began writing down family stories as dictated by her parents. In 1975 she was diagnosed with
lymphoma and began to change the family stories into a novel that would later become
Cold Sassy Tree. The novel was finally published eight years after it was begun, in 1984. Burns received so many letters pleading for a follow-up novel that she began writing
Leaving Cold Sassy. Burns died of
heart failure in 1990, at age 65, in a hospital in
Atlanta, Georgia, before finishing the manuscript, and the uncompleted novel was published in 1992 along with her notes. ==References==