Since the end of World War II, the South has experienced a greater awareness of growth and of its accompanying tensions than other regions of the United States. The rapid change that climaxed with the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights demonstrations, and Watergate has forced the traditional South to come to terms with social upheaval. As the essays collected in Southern Writers at Century's End point out, southern writing: since 1975 reflects the confusion and violence that have characterized late-twentieth-century public culture. These essays consider the work of twenty-one of the foremost southern writers whose most important fiction has appeared in the last quarter of this century. As the region's contemporary writers have begun to gain a wide audience, critics have begun to distinguish what Hugh Holman has called "the fresh, the vital, and the new" in southern literary culture. Southern Writers at Century's End is the first volume to take an extensive look at the current generation of southern writers. Authors considered include: James Lee Burke, Fred Chappell, Robert Drake, Andre Dubus, Clyde Edgerton, Richard Ford, Kaye Gibbons, John Grisham, Barry Hannah, Mary Hood, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Richard Marius, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Tim McLaurin, T.R. Pearson, Lee Smith, Anne Tyle,r Alice Walker, and James Wilcox.

Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "All the King's Men" is one of the undisputed classics of American literature. Fifty years after the novel's publication, Warren's characters still stand as powerful representations of the moral dilemmas faced by individuals in positions of power. "All the King's Men" had its genesis in Warren's stage play "Proud Flesh," unpublished in his lifetime. He also wrote a subsequent unpublished play titled "Willie Stark: His Rise and Fall" and a later dramatic version of the novel that shared the title "All the King's Men."

This volume is the first to collect all three dramatic texts and to publish "Proud Flesh and Willie Stark." "Proud Flesh" is particularly fascinating for what it reveals about the development of "All the King's Men" and Warren's changing perceptions of its characters and themes. The other plays, as post-novel writings, provide a forum for Warren to clarify his intentions in the novel. The editors' introduction to this collection reviews the composition history of the works and their relationship to the novel and to each other.

The new perspectives on Warren's writing presented in "Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men": Three Stage Versions" provide a glimpse into a creative mind struggling with a compelling story and offer readers another way of looking at this American classic. This book is an essential reference in Warren studies that will give students of "All the King's Men" another context from which to consider Warren's novel.

Though he has authored more than eleven novels including, "Cassandra Singing, The Suicide's
Wife, Abducted by Circumstance," and the recent "London Bridge in Plague and Fire," David
Madden has been publishing short stories for all six decades of his active career. "The Last
Bizarre Tale" consists of works that appeared in journals but that have not appeared together
as a collection.
Madden used two stories, "The Singer" and "Second Look Presents: the Rape of an
Indian Brave," as chapters in his 1980 novel "On the Big Wind." "The Headless Girl's Mother"
was first published as a chapter in a serialized novel entitled "Hair of the Dog." Two other stories
developed out of longer versions of Madden's novels. "A Demon in My View" is part of
a sequel, not yet published, to "Bijou."
All of the stories in David Madden's third collection are distinguished by variety of content
and by shifting styles and often innovative techniques. They are to varying degrees and
in various ways bizarre in their characters and their relationships, in the kinds of internal
and external conflicts, and in locales and themes. The title story, "The Last Bizarre Tale," involving
a corpse that has hung on a hook in a funeral home garage for decades, is evocative
of Poe and, in its dark, grotesque humor, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers.
"Process is as important as product to David Madden," writes editor James Perkins,
"and one can learn as much about the process of writing as about the human condition by a
careful reading of these stories."