The very best essays from fifty years of scholarship and thought Essays by Margaret Walker Alexander, Alfred Bendixen, David C. Berry, Augustus M. Burns, James Taylor Carson, Thadious M. Davis, Susan V. Donaldson, Don H. Doyle, Barbara C. Ewell, Robert L. Hall, William H. Hatcher, Arthell Kelley, Manning Marable, Joseph Millichap, Willie Morris, John Solomon Otto, Harriet Pollack, Kathryn L. Seidel, John Ray Skates, Randy J. Sparks, Martha Swain, and Anne Bradford Warner The Past Is Not Dead is a collection of twenty literary and historical essays that will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Southern Quarterly, one of the oldest scholarly journals (founded in 1962) dedicated to southern studies. Like its companion volume Personal Souths, this essay collection features the best work published in the journal. Essays represent every decade of the journal's history, from the 1960s to the 2000s. Topics range from historical essays on the Mississippi frontier, southern religion, African culinary influences, and New Deal politics, to literary essays on George W. Cable, James Dickey, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. Important regional subjects like the Yazoo Basin and Mississippi blues are given special attention. Contributors range from such noted literary figures as Margaret Walker Alexander and Willie Morris, to literary critics Thadious M. Davis, Susan V. Donaldson, Kathryn L. Seidel, and Joseph Millichap, to scholars of African American studies such as Robert L. Hall and Manning Marable and historians including Don H. Doyle, Randy J. Sparks, and Martha Swain. Collectively, the essays in The Past Is Not Dead enrich and illuminate our understanding of southern history, literature, and culture, and celebrate the work of a distinctive, distinguished journal.

"The Past Is Not Dead" is a collection of twenty-one literary and historical essays that will mark the 50th anniversary of the "Southern Quarterly," one of the oldest scholarly journals (founded in 1962) dedicated to southern studies. Like its companion volume, "Personal Souths," "The Past Is Not Dead" features the best of the work published in the journal. Essays represent every decade of the journal's history, from the 1960s to the 2000s. Topics covered range from historical essays on the French and Indian War, the New Deal, and Emmett Till's influence on the Black Panther Party to literary figures including William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. Important regional subjects like the Natchez Trace, the Yazoo Basin, the Choctaw Indians, and Mississippi blues are given special attention. Contributors range from noted literary critics such as Margaret Walker Alexander, Virginia Spencer Carr, Susan V. Donaldson, James Justus, and Willie Morris to scholars of African-American studies such as Robert L. Hall and Manning Marble and historians including John Ray Skates, Martha Swain, and Randy Sparks.

Collectively, the essays in this volume enrich and illuminate our understanding of southern history, literature, and culture.

This book of conversations with one of America's most revered writers extends the firsthand account of Eudora Welty's life and work from the early 1980s to the present and supplements Conversations with Eudora Welty, which novelist Anne Tyler said brought her "pure pleasure." These interviews include many that refer to Welty's memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, and greatly amplify the picture of her personal life that emerged from the earlier collection of interviews. She reminisces here about her parents, her childhood and schooldays in Jackson, Mississippi, and her sojourns in New York City. She speaks of gardening, travel, friends, and writers--both of contemporaries she had known as friends or associates and those she has never met, except through their books. One whose presence and influence she never fails to mention in conversations about admired predecessors is Anton Chekov. Others whose names recur frequently in these interviews are her friends Katherine Anne Porter and Elizabeth Bowen. Here too Welty answers questions about her photographic work and about the photographic images she recorded in the 1930s. With her interviewers, she also assesses changes she has witnessed during her lifetime--changes in the southern landscape, southern society, southern writing. She talks about her own experiences with aging, the inevitable loss of friends, and the waning of physical vitality. She replies to queries about specific characters and settings in her work--questions about origins, sources, and real-life counterparts. She reveals some of her compositional designs in the writing of Losing Battles and The Optimist's Daughter and discusses the significance of the Delta region as the setting for The Golden Apples. Her lifetime interest in local details--names, customs, and tales, such as those that show up in Mississippi country newspapers and farm journals--has long been evident in her stories, and her she recalls them with evident pleasure.

Collections of interviews with notable modern writers

Women Writers of the Contemporary South edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw essays about Lisa Alther, Toni Cade Bambara, Doris Betts, Rita Mae Brown, Ellen Douglas, Ellen Gilchrist, Gail Godwin, Shirley Ann Grau, Beverly Lowry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Berry Morgan, Mary Lee Settle, Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Joan Williams The essays in this collection are evidence that the most notable fiction writers of the contemporary South very well may be women writers. As a part of the new generation following the Southern Renaissance-writers not restricted by regionalism-the seventeen featured in this book are women whose first novels or collections of short stories were published after 1945. One essay about each, written by a scholar in the field, gives insight into her southern identity and evaluates her fiction. Included is a checklist of fiction and selected criticism. In a provocative concluding essay, Why There Are No Southern Writers, novelist Daphne Althas traces changes of style and subjects in recent southern fiction. The writers included differ most noticeably from earlier twentieth-century writers in their depiction of a southern region more typically suburban than rural and in their portrayal of characters more mobile and transient than rooted in the southern past. In fact, in a number of their works the action is set outside the South, although with few exceptions the central characters are recognizably southern. Among these writers are prize winners (Pulitzers, O. Henrys) whose literary reputations are already firmly established, as well as newly emerging talents. Each of them has a striking originality. As a group, their works represent a significant segment of contemporary American fiction. Women Writers of the Contemporary South offers insights into important new writing from one of literary America's most productive regions. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw is Humanities Scholar in Residence at Millsaps College.

It is well known that New Orleans has its dark underside as well as its glowing visible delights. The journey that Julia Garrett, an intelligent, attractive, but psychically driven girl, makes through the city's hidden labyrinth shapes the movement of this riveting novel. In crisscrossing the city from the secure world of home in the Garden District to the titillating world of the Vieux Carre, Julia risks physical and psychological peril. As she explores life on the other side, she becomes engulfed in the vortex of evil.

In "The Snare," one of America's most highly acclaimed fiction writers explores the mystery of place and the mystifying duality of the human wish, with its desire for both dark and light. The book masterfully evokes the ineffable sense of excitement aroused by the sinister, exotic beauty of New Orleans and the men and women who inhabit its fecund streets."