King blends the personal, the political, and the picaresque.

Larry L. Kings life story.

"Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University."

The New South—replete with shopping malls, hub airports, educated African Americans, and immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Haiti—is still haunted by the Gothic ghosts of its past. Does the collision between past and present account for the continued preeminence of Southern writers in America's literary culture? Bobbie Ann Mason, Ernest Gaines, Rita Mae Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Dorothy Allison, and Allan Gurganus are just a few of the writers who draw on a new kind of Southern background while reaching out to a broad American readership. Yet many of these writers have been accused of catering to the stereotypes they think a national audience requires. It would seem that questions of Southern identity continue to be bound up with rage against attacks on Southern culture. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe have assembled a remarkable team of scholars and writers to examine aspects of the contemporary literature of the South. From Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Fred Hobson to esteemed scholar James Olney to poets Kate Daniels and Brenda Marie Osbey, the contributors try to define Southern culture today and ask who will be writing Southern literature tomorrow. Addressing topics such as humor, the past, black autobiography, ethnicity, and female oral traditions, the essays form a volume that is of interest to readers of Southern literature and history, creative writers, and scholars and students of Southern culture.

This book is an apologia for the rooted intellectual against the disdainful condescension of the cosmopolitan intellectual—an apology in the Socratic sense of the word. It reflects the author’s Texas rootedness unapologetically and offers a polemical but thoughtful indictment of the intellectual prejudice against rootedness; but it is ultimately about the universal human struggle with origins.

Three men's lives, told through the story of one song. Jerry Jeff Walker, the singer and writer behind the classic hit "Mr. Bojangles," never would have expected that his song, inspired by an experience in a New Orleans jail cell, would make Richard Nixon cry, or that it would be covered by Sammy Davis, Jr., the entertainment giant and, controversially, a supporter of Nixon. This work, told through the perspective of writer, performer and listener, traces these three men's overlapping journeys through the American consciousness. Chapters discuss the history of Walker's song, Davis's rise from rags to riches, Nixon's journey from grocer's son to president, and more.

An anecdotal, rollicking tour through America's most colorful region. From the Tidewater through Appalachia, down the Blue Ridge country and into the sunbelt, B.C. Hall and C.T. Wood take us through the American South, inviting us to listen to its music -- blues, country, gospel, and rock -- and to the voices that have shaped its extraordinary, distinctive literature. Interweaving interviews with people both ordinary and famous with thought-provoking reflections on Southern life, history, politics, humor, religion, and cultural icons, The South is a matchless, impressionistic portrait of a people and a place.