The past isn't dead. It isn't even the past," William Faulker wrote.The Southern Reporter constitutes a report on the collisions between a present that cannot find its voice and a past that reaches out incessantly into the lives of contemporary men and women.An old Louisiana lawyer finds himself in California seeking a missing heir who is a physicist, musician, doctor, theologian-and a leader of a crazed and murderous santanistic cult.A childless retired couple prepares treats for Halloween's children-only to find that the "children" have taken on the character of their terrifying costumes.An elderly lawyer, dying of cancer, is forced to recall an even greater pain and finds his own kind of salvation in the remembrance of love.A court reporter, who has spent his life recording the crimes and affairs of others, at last cannot stand the flood of evil and visits his own justice on a man the jury has found innocent of rape.A young boy is caught between his high-spirited, hell-raising uncle and the deadly civilizing force of his mother.The Southern Reporter penetrates the façade of contemporary life, looking for its roots in the past -- not simply the past of its people but the looming imaginary structure of western history, against which all of us lead our lives -- and die our deaths. The search for images of order and the loss of them constitute the meaning of The Southern Reporter.

From a gullible cub reporter with the Daily Herald in Biloxi and Gulfport, to the peerless beat reporter for the Los Angeles Times covering civil rights in the South, Jack Nelson was dedicated to exposing injustice and corruption wherever he found it. Once he realized that segregation was another form of corruption, he became a premier reporter of the civil rights movement. Nelson was, through his steely commitment to journalism, a chronicler of great events, a witness to news, a shaper and reshaper of viewpoints, and indeed one of the most important journalists of the twentieth century.