NEW ORLEANS — Shirley Ann Grau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer whose stories and novels told of both the dark secrets and the beauty of the Deep South, has died. She was 91.

Grau died Monday in a New Orleans-area memory care facility of complications from a stroke, her daughter Nora McAlister of Metairie said Wednesday. She said the family is not planning a funeral or memorial service for her, in accordance with her mother’s wishes.

Grau won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for her fourth book, “The Keepers of the House.”

“I came home from kindergarten to a house full of reporters and I didn’t know what was going on,” McAlister recalled.

The book drew critical praise but also threatening phone calls for its depiction of a long romance between a wealthy white man and his black housekeeper in rural Alabama.

Grau said Ku Klux Klansmen, angry over the book amid the heat of the civil rights movement, tried to burn a cross on her yard in Metairie, a New Orleans suburb.

They apparently forgot to bring a shovel, and couldn’t drive the cross into the ground, so set it on fire flat on the lawn, she told The Associated Press in 2003.

“It scorched a few feet of grass and it scared the neighbors, but I wasn’t even here. I was at Martha’s Vineyard. It all had kind of a Groucho Marx ending to it,” she said.