Personal Souths, a collection of 20 interviews with famous southern
writers, will mark the 50th anniversary of The Southern Quarterly,
one of the oldest scholarly journals (founded in 1962) dedicated to
southern studies. The figures interviewed range from Erskine
Caldwell, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams (all from the 1970s),
to a virtual Who's-Who of southern literature in the second half of
the twentieth century. All of these interviews were originally
published in the journal in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and are
collected here for the first time. The South is represented
broadly, with writers from eight states; at least four represent
the ""mountain South"" (Donald Harrington, Bobbie Ann Mason, Robert
Morgan, Lee Smith), while another four typify a ""cosmopolitan
South"" (Reynolds Price, Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Spencer,
Tennessee Williams). The greatest number of voices, at least eight
of the authors, speak for or from the ""poor white South"" (Larry
Brown, Erskine Caldwell, Harry Crews, Donald Harrington, Bobbie Ann
Mason, Robert Morgan, Del Shores, Lee Smith). Though there is only
one African American writer, Ernest J. Gaines, another interview
(William Styron, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Confessions
of Nat Turner) also focuses on a conversation about African
American literature.The interviews are all fascinating. Not only do
they reveal the personalities of these southern literary stars,
they also represent a self-conscious community of writers. It is a
testament to the quality of The Southern Quarterly that many of
these writers, when discussing their most important contemporaries,
often refer to other writers whose interviews are also in this
collection. These first-hand discussions will continue to
illuminate and inform our understanding of their creative work.
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