Robert Benjamin Hicks III was born on January 30, 1951 in West Palm Beach, Florida, where his parents, Robert Hicks Jr. and Pauline Electa (Tollman) Hicks, ran a water treatment company. He was descended from both sides of West Tennessee farmers—the town of Hicksville, Tennessee, is named after one of his ancestors, and he spent summers there traveling to the places where Ulysses S. Grant led his troops through the region in 1862.
His half-brother, Mr. Sanders, is the only survivor.
Mr. Hicks graduated in 1973 from David Lipscomb University in Nashville where he studied history. A year later, he returned to Tennessee with his recently widowed mother and settled in Franklin.
He moved without a career plan, and one night, while lamenting this fact in a bar, a woman offered him a job as an agent and publisher for some of the crowd of young songwriters and musicians who were then flooding into Nashville.
He soon began working with artists such as Vince Gill and John Hyatt, many of whom he invited to weekend dinners at Labor in Vain, in front of which he built a huge fire pit. After dinner, famous and unknown musicians handed out guitars each, playing old standards and new compositions.
Inside, they could peruse his ever-growing collection of antiques, both impressive and inconsequential, from stately dining chairs to old nails and used pencils. Among his valuables was a tube of PoliGrip, which he took from the bathroom of Roy Acuff, a country singer, after his death.
Mr. Hicks continued the success of The Widow of the South with two more novels: A Separate Country (2009) and The Orphan Mother (2016).
He developed bladder cancer in 2018 but continued to work on conservation issues, including objecting to a mixed-use development project adjacent to a Civil War-era fort in Nashville.