Southern Cultures

Famous Southerners (A-G)

This is a compendium of all our material from the last decade by and about Southern movers and shakers of the last century-and-a-half. You can read each essay, interview, or feature by following the direct links below to the content on Project Muse, which includes material from our Special Biography Issue, as well as by clicking on $0.99 Kindle or Nook downloads for each of our most recent essays. We've listed these contents alphabetically by last name. This section covers Famous Southerners from A to G. (Famous Southerners from H to M are here. Famous Southerners from N to S are here. Famous Southerners from T to Z are here.)

Margaret Walker Alexander

“My idol was Langston Hughes”:
The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence
from a talk delivered by Margaret Walker Alexander
“As a small child in the 1920s, I was very much affected by the Harlem Renaissance. As early as age eleven, I had read poetry by Langston Hughes.”
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

Dorothy Allison

The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers
Featuring the Fiction of Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and Tim McLaurin
by Erik Bledsoe
"White trash is no longer something to sweep out the back door."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2000: Fifth Anniversary

Louis Armstrong

The Top Ten Southern Jazz Musicians
     by Charles Joyner
     "The cornetist, trumpeter, vocalist, composer, and bandleader Louis Armstrong synthesized the contributions of the New Orleans pioneers, but his own chops-his tone, his range, his speed, and his creative solos-were like nothing jazz had known before."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Louis Armstrong's Love Songs
     by Gavin James Campbell
     "...a delightful complement to any romantic evening or weekend morning."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000

Charline Arthur

Charline Arthur: The Unmaking of a Honky-Tonk Star
by Emily Neely
"Perhaps the real and overlooked cause for Charline's short-lived career was her inability, in part due to a media that rigidly defined celebrities based upon traditional gender stereotypes, to secure a substantial fan base among women listeners."
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002: Biography

Ella Baker

Barbara Ransby
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (review)
reviewed by Charles M. Payne
“I used to give a speech which began by claiming that Ella Baker invented the 1960s. That’s not as crazy as it sounds.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2004

Joanne Grant's
Ella Baker
Freedom Bound
reviewed by Edward O. Frantz
"Through Baker's eyes the reader finds a critical view of Martin Luther King Jr. and NAACP president Walter White."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2000

Billy E. Barnes

Forty Years after the War on Poverty
Billy E. Barnes, interviewed by Elizabeth Gritter
"There are times when you come upon a scene and everything is right. It tells a story. It has a center of interest. It has emotion. It has people in it who are beautiful people—and I don't mean Hollywood beautiful."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005

Wendell Berry

"All Goes Back to the Earth": The Poetry of Wendell Berry
by Henry Taylor
"He comes from a landscape, a region, and maybe a family tradition that would engender small patience with a literary work that is patently much more about itself than anything else."
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2001: Environment

Doris Betts

The Goal of a Realist
by Doris Betts
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art

"We were the Snopeses": A Writer and Her Piedmont
by Doris Betts
An unexpected kinship with Flannery O'Connor and an exploration of what it means to be a "piedmonter."
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999

Killers Real and Imagined
by Doris Betts
Real-life tragedy is the genesis for lasting art when the murder of Medgar Evers sparks the muse of Eudora Welty.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999

Roy Blount Jr

Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor
by Roy Blount Jr., editor
reviewed by Michael McFee
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor

Roy Blount Jr
Robert E. Lee: A Shattered Nation
reviewed by J. Tracy Power
"'What on earth,' you may be asking yourself, 'is the point of another book on Robert E. Lee?'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006

Julian Bond

Julian Bond
interviewed by Elizabeth Gritter
"We just said, 'Whoa, what was that?' and later saw this bullet hole."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006

Heritage, not Hate? Collecting Black Memorabilia
by Lynn Casmier-Paz
with a response by Julian Bond
“When I arrived at the Silver Spring Armory, I found the place jammed with brown and black people hawking rusted ‘Authentic Slave Shackles’ that only a consumer with a platinum credit card could purchase.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003

Larry Brown

Sterling A. Brown

The Souths of Sterling A. Brown
by Elizabeth Davey
Revealing a fuller African American experience.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999

Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell: A Biography
by Harvey L. Klevar
reviewed by Fred Hobson
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995

The Novel as Social History: Erskin Caldwell's God's Little Acre and Class Relations in the New South
by Bryant Simon
The author explores deep divisions between early twentieth-century South Carolina's farmers and mill hands as seen in the work of Erskine Caldwell and in recent labor history.
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 3-4, Fall/Winter 1996: Double Issue

Dan B. Miller's
Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road
Wayne Mixon's
The People's Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South
reviewed by Bryant Simon
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998

Stokely Carmichael

Kwame Ture
Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
“In August 1967 the director of the FBI urged his agents to ‘prevent the rise of a messiah who would unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.’"
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004

Billy Carter

Becoming Billy Carter: Clothes Make the Man (and His Many Characters)
by José Blanco F.
“The regulars at the station had great fun with the press. The station was home to some of the greatest liars and bullshit artists in the history of the world, and tabloid reporters were nothing more than a light snack before lunch for them.”
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

Jimmy Carter

Peter G. Bourne's
Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency
Kenneth E. Morris's
Jimmy Carter: American Moralist
reviewed by Leo P. Ribuffo
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 4, Winter 1998: The South in the World

Hodding Carter

Looking Back
by Hodding Carter
Can a prominent Mississippi liberal love the Battle Flag? The answer may surprise you.
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 3-4, Fall/Winter 1996: Double Issue

The Carter Family

Wildwood Flowers: The Carter Family
by Bland Simpson
"They lit out over the bad roads, and the family car broke down in the middle of a stream."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 4, Winter 2006: Music I

William Christenberry

"Those little color snapshots": William Christenberry
     interviewed by William R. Ferris
     featuring full-color photographs by William Christenberry
     "Follow the evolution of the vision and career of one of the South's foremost photographers as he tells his story in his own words."
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Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($7.21), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II

Pat Conroy

A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe
by Pat Conroy
The author of The Great Santini reveals a long admiration for the author of Look Homeward, Angel.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999

Septima Clark

“I train the people to do their own talking”: Septima Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement
     from interviews by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Eugene P. Walker
     by Katherine Mellen Charron and David P. Cline
     introduced by Katherine Mellen Charron
     “They don't give the women any of the glory.”
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96) or for Nook ($8.35)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

Harry Crews

Erik Bledsoe
Perspectives on Harry Crews (review)
reviewed by Frank W. Shelton
“‘I do think that if I live, and assuming they don’t blow the frigging world up, that I’ll finish Assault of Memory because I really want to write it, but, damn, it’s ugly."
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002: Biography

Sam Davis

"The Boys Will Have to Fight the Battles without Me": The Making of Sam Davis, "Boy Hero of the Confederacy,"
by Michael C. Cohen
"'You could buy all the dope you wanted in the drug store. Just ask for it, and you got it.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006

Hazel Dickens

Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone
Working Girl Blues: The Life & Music of Hazel Dickens (review)
reviewed by Joshua Guthman
“Hazel Dickens came of age in the West Virginia coalfields where so many of her family members and neighbors worked.”
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2010: Southern Lives

Annie Dillard

Nancy C. Parrish's
Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers
reviewed by Amy Thompson McCandless
"It was like falling into a womb."
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999

The Dixie Chicks

The Dixie Chicks Fly
by Gavin James Campbell
"For those who wondered whether the Dixie Chicks were a flash in the pan, wonder no more."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2000: Fifth Anniversary

Dorsey Dixon

"A Blessing to People": Dorsey Dixon and His Sacred Mission of Song
by Patrick Huber
"Songwriter and singer Dorsey Dixon was never supposed to live."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 4, Winter 2006: Music I

John Dollard

John Dollard: Caste and Class Revisited
interviewed by William R. Ferris
"The whole church would be a riot of the most beautiful songs. To be in the middle of it was for me an ecstasy, one of the greatest experiences of my life. An odd thing about it was that the singing would never completely die down."
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004

David Duke

The Emergence of David Duke and the Politics of Race
by Douglas Rose, editor
reviewed by Richard A. Pride
Southern Cultures, The Inaugural Issue, 1993

Washington Duke

The Duke
by Duncan Murrell
"The Dukes linked sex and the cigarette, which was audacious not only because they were abstemious Methodists but because there’s no earthly reason burning a foul weed in your mouth ought to invoke the pleasures of sex. And yet it does."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2006: Tobacco

W. E. B. DuBois

How W. E. B. DuBois Won the United Daughters of the Confederacy Essay Contest
by Bruce E. Baker
"Nearly a century ago W. E. B. DuBois won an essay contest sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy—or at least, DuBois’s writing won the contest."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

Virginia Foster Durr

Learning from the Long Civil Rights Movement’s First Generation: Virginia Foster Durr
     from interviews by M. Sue Thrasher, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Bob Hall
     compiled and introduced by Sarah Thuesen
    “So I took each in turn, and they told me why they hated white folks. This took quite a while, because they were extremely articulate about why they hated white folks.”
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

Dale Earnhardt

The Last Lap of the Daytona 500
poetry by Adrian Blevins
". . . there's now the death of Dale Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt,
Dale Earnhardt."
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2004

Clyde Edgerton

The Raney Controversy: Clyde Edgerton's Fight for Creative Freedom
by George Hovis
"'There were a lot of people who supported Clyde, but they just did not feel comfortable voicing any kind of support. There was this element of fear.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2001

William Eggleston

Mapping the Democratic Forest: The Postsouthern Spaces of William Eggleston
by Ben Child, with full-color photographs by William Eggleston
"Eggleston, the iconoclastic and colorful groundbreaker, imbues the mundane with vibrancy."
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Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($7.21), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 2, Summer 2011: Photography II

Walker Evans

Walker Evans, 1974
interviewed by William R. Ferris
"I approach these things as a moralist, really, because honesty and truth are moral values, but beauty is something else. And it's a word that should be used damn carefully."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I

Medgar Evers

William Faulkner

Harold Burson: On Interviewing Faulkner for the Memphis Commercial Appeal
by William R. Ferris
"He'd go in his back woods and drink himself insensible with some of his sharecropper friends."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006

Don Harrison Doyle
Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (review)
reviewed by Linda Wagner-Martin
“Faulkner and his work remain lynchpins of the study of southern culture.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003

Donald M. Kartiganer
Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect (review)
reviewed by Stephen M. Ross
“Much of what we say about Faulkner we are really saying about ourselves.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002: Biography

Yoknapatawpha: Images and Voices
by George G. Stewart
Haunting photographs from Mississippi evoke William Faulkner's mythical landscape.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998

Charles Reagan Wilson's
Judgment & Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis
reviewed by Wayne Flynt
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 1998

Faulkner and Southern History: A View from Germany
by Peter Nicolaisen
An account of one German novelist's struggle with his nation's past, and of Faulkner's resonance within German culture.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 4, Winter 1998: The South in the World

Tom Rankin, editor
Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain
reviewed by Christopher Brookhouse
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999

"How the negros [sic] became McCaslins too...": A New Faulkner Letter
by Noel Polk
William Faulkner, the architect of Go Down, Moses, flirts with his good friend's wife in a nearly-lost letter and drops a few clues left out of the book's famous ledgers.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999

Pura Fé

Blues Power in the Tuscarora Homeland: The Music of Pura Fé
     by John W. Troutman
     “Pura Fé has developed a highly unusual style of weaving a fast-paced and complex, sinewy web of notes to follow and accent her extraordinarily dynamic vocal range. . . a unique and engagingly melodic tour de force.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 3, Fall 2009: Music III

Atticus Finch

Letters to the Editors : The Redemption of Atticus Finch
“Joseph Crespino’s interpretation of To Kill a Mockingbird must be politically motivated, because it certainly is not based on the text.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000

The Strange Career of Atticus Finch
by Joseph Crespino
"Certain school districts across the country have censored To Kill a Mockingbird for its sexual content, and some have banned the book because of its depiction of racism."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2000

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

Zelda Sayre, Belle
by Linda Wagner-Martin
"There are few more memorable wives in twentieth-century American culture than Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who was married to the successful young author F. Scott Fitzgerald."
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004

Leo Frank

And the Dead Shall Rise: An Overview
by Steve Oney
"In the 1913 South the novelty of a white jury convicting a white man largely on the word of a black man was enormous. Yet even so, it was only in the trial's aftermath that the deeper and more volatile issues came to the fore."
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005

John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin and John Whittington Franklin, editors
My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin
reviewed by Jimmie Lewis Franklin
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999

Charles Frazier

"A World Properly Put Together": Environmental Knowledge in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain
by Albert Way
"It has been more than seven years since the publication of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, and it has become nothing short of a phenomenon."
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004

Cold Mountain
reviewed by Edward D.C. Campbell
“This is a world in complete turmoil—a civilization falling to pieces—and one seldom so strongly presented in Civil War films. And yet, in the end, there is a regeneration of southern family and community.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004

George P. Garrett

George P. Garrett
Southern Excusions: Views on Southern Letters in My Time (review)
reviewed by Samuel F. Pickering
“George Garrett’s presence turns dark rooms brighter than rainbows. He makes people smile, and for moments worry grinds slower and life seems more gift than burden. In George’s company scoffers become appreciators.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2004

Newt Gingrich

Dan Carter's
From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994
reviewed by Ferrel Guillory
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997

Ellen Glasgow

Dorothy M. Scura, editor
Ellen Glasgow: New Perspectives
reviewed by Susan V. Donaldson
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 4, Winter 1998: The South in the World

Harry Golden

The "Golden" Era of Civil Rights: Consequences of The Carolina Israelite
by Stephen J. Whitfield
"The Carolina Israelite was a remarkable solo act, a bold effort to liberate its southern white readers from the inertia of tradition, defying the odds that anyone producing a one-man newspaper in the mid-twentieth century was very likely to be a crank."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 3, Fall 2008: Civil Rights

Remembering Harry Golden: Food, Race, and Laughter
by Tom Hanchett
"'I have a positive cure for this mental aberration called anti-Semitism. I believe that if we gave each anti-Semite an onion roll with lox and cream cheese, some chopped chicken liver with a nice radish, and a good piece of brisket of beef with a few potato pancakes, he’d soon give up all this nonsense.'"
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005

Billy Graham

Steven P. Miller
Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
“In 1953, Graham removed the ropes separating black and white attendees at his crusade in Chattanooga, and asserted that, were segregated seating restored, “you can go on and have the revival without me.” His sympathies were with those white moderates who acknowledged the inevitability of racial equality but did not feel its urgency.”
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.69) or for Sony Reader ($9.45)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2010: Southern Lives

Just As I Am Not: A Poet Visits the Billy Graham Library
by Michael McFee
“Do they keep an eye out for the possible wayward soul (like, say, a middle-aged guy with scraggly graying hair who stays at the margins of the group and keeps scribbling in a little black book)?”
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2010: Southern Lives

Paul Green

Paul Green and the Southern Literary Renaissance
by John Herbert Roper
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1994

Incident at the Depot
by Paul Green
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1994

Allan Gurganus

Allan Gurganus on Sherman's March
from "Personal in My Memory": The South in Popular Film
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Full Issue for Kindle ($3.96), for Nook ($4.15), or for Sony Reader ($4.70)
Southern Cultures, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory

The Country Child, When Overpraised
by Allan Gurganus
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art

FAMOUS SOUTHERNERS (H-M)
FAMOUS SOUTHERNERS (N-S)
FAMOUS SOUTHERNERS (T-Z)

Famous Southerners (A-G)

Famous Southerners (H-M)Famous Southerners (N-S)

Famous Southerners (H-M)

Famous Southerners (N-S)