2674 search results for: Southern%25252BHeritage

Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird has sold over 30 million copies since its publication in 1960.  Hardly a high-school student in America over the last 40 years has graduated without having read the 1930’s-era drama of a small-town Southern lawyer who defends an innocent black man accused of rape by a white woman. ...

Moving by fits and starts, this biography of the Southern novelist and wife of Allen Tate lacks focus and—ultimately—purpose. Veronica Makowsky’s is a dull account of an inherently interesting subject. This relatively small book is essentially a failure, rendering, as it does, a diminished, fragmented, and elusive portrait of Caroline Gordon. The book does include...

One of two epigraphs with which Elizabeth Spencer introduces her memoir of growing up in northern Mississippi is taken from the closing sentence of her story, “A Southern Landscape.” The narrator, looking back on her hometown from a far remove in place and time, acknowledges her need “of a land, of a sure terrain, of...

The road to hell, I was taught as a child, is paved with good intentions. Surely no one could fault the intentions of the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy—Martin Luther King’s right arm and successor in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—as revealed in this fascinating and moving autobiography. Inspired by faith in Divine mercy, by a...

Writing—literary creation in the fullness of the sense that we have known it in the previous century and even in the one before, from the French and Russian masters, the daft Irish, the mad Yankees, the haunted Southerners (and from elsewhere, of course)—sometimes seems to be on the way out.  Senses of language, of irony,...

Few men in America are as reviled by the liberal establishment as Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance.  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), he is “a courtly presenter of ideas that most would consider crudely white supremacist.”  Keep in mind that the SPLC is an organization that cites Thomas Fleming, editor of...

Abraham Lincoln remains the central historical figure in modern America; the only others who can compete with him in their influence on the present and the degree of adulation accorded them are Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Rev. “Dr.” Martin Luther King, Jr.  Lincoln is praised for having accomplished two things: preserving the Union and...

Consider these two premises: First, in 1865, the Confederacy is collapsing, and President Davis, concerned about the funds in the treasury, sends a young naval officer out on a wild expedition to hide the gold, to be used some day to help the South. Second, in 2005, knowledge of the whereabouts of the hidden gold...

Poetry, short story, novel, drama, screenplay, criticism, the teaching of writing: George Garrett has excelled across the entire spectrum of literary art. I can call to mind no other contemporary American writer who approaches this feat, though perhaps Garrett’s friend Fred Chappell comes closest. But, what is even rarer for a first-rank artist, Garrett also...

The U.S. government continues its slow but relentless buildup of military forces in the Middle East, preparing to unleash “Fourth-Generation” warfare against the eighth reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.  Historians and pseudo-historians extol the liberating glories of past redemptive wars waged by God’s instrument on earth.  The Bush administration, neocons, and theocons (and other cons in...

Some thoughtful soul, not I, would perhaps have some positive words about the present volume, and not without some justification.  There is much to be said in praise of the Library of America and the quality of its volumes in various categories of presentation, and in the past I not only have acknowledged such manifest...

In his last novel, In the Tennessee Country, published the summer before Peter Taylor’s death on November 2, 1994, a man, the narrator’s cousin, “chucks” his family, his home, and his identity, and disappears. What is important about Cousin Aubrey, however, is not so much his mysterious absence from the narrator’s life as his lingering...

The centennial of that enormous calamity later known as World War I saw the release of about a dozen books on the subject.  Catastrophe 1914, by Sir Max Hastings, one of the foremost British military historians writing today, is an exhaustive, one-volume history of that annus horribilis and the events leading up to the fatal...

The life of Lee having been “done,” redone, and perhaps even undone by revisionist treatment, the present weighty phenomenon requires some contextual examination.  We might first and simply ask the question, What is the purpose of this book?  I mean to say that the revisionist treatment of the so-called Civil War has been gathering force...