A Double-wide What?

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A Double-wide What?

by John Shelton Reed
Southern Cultures, Vol. 3, No. 4: Winter 1997

"More than half of the South's new housing stock is now made up of mobile homes, single- and, yes, double-wide, and most southerners have at least a second-hand acquaintance with this unpretentious if image-challenged form of shelter."

For her novel Devil’s Dream, Lee Smith wrote the great country-music lyric, “On a double bed in a double-wide with a double shot of gin, / I’m a single gal in a one-horse town sleeping alone again.” When she went her manuscript to her New York publisher, Smith reports, it came back with the copyeditor’s marginal query, “A double-wide what?”

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