6. As of 2015, more than ten million copies of Sedaris’s books were in print, in twenty-five languages. “David Sedaris,” Barclay Agency, accessed October 9, 2015, http://barclayagency.com//site/speaker/david-sedaris. After a dedicated search, I have uncovered only one public use of the adjective “southern” to describe him: Ryan Richie, who in a Rolling Stone piece referred to him as “America’s favorite Southern ex-Santa.” Sedaris may well be southern, but at Macy’s Santaland he played the role of elf. See “Q&A: David Sedaris on Profanity, Book Tours and the YMCA,” Rolling Stone, May 10, 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/q-a-david-sedaris-on-profanity-book-tours-and-the-ymca-20130510.
7. David Sedaris, When You are Engulfed in Flames (Boston: Little, Brown, 2008), copyright page; Gilbert Cruz, “10 Questions for David Sedaris,” Time, July 5, 2008, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812072,00.html; Alex Heard, “This American Lie,” New Republic, March 19, 2007, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/american-lie-midget-guitar-teacher-macys-elf-and-thetruth-about-david-sedaris; Kylie Cardell and Victoria Kuttainen, “The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir,” Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 45, no. 3 (September 2012): 99–114; Kevin Kopelson, Sedaris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 3, 11–15; Finding Your Roots, season 2, episode 9, “Ancient Roots,” directed by Muriel Soenes, Josh Gleason, Phil Bertelsen, Jesse Sweet, Sabin Streeter, written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., featuring Tina Fey, David Sedaris, and George Stephanopoulos, aired November 18, 2014, on PBS; Heard, “This American Lie.”
8. David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 18.
9. United States Bureau of the Census. Census of Population: 1960. Volume I, Part 34: New York. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), 14–15; Volume I, part 35: North Carolina, 31; Sedaris, “You Can’t Kill the Rooster,” Me Talk Pretty One Day, 60–61; Sedaris, “Get Your Ya-Yas Out!,” Naked (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), 23–24; Sedaris, “Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities,” Me Talk Pretty One Day, 18; Warren St. John, “Turning Sour Grapes Into A Silk Purse,” New York Times, June 6, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/style/turning-sour-grapes-into-a-silk-purse.html.
10. Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: the South in the American Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Derek Nystrom, Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5; “Binghamton, New York—A Brief History,” City of Binghamton, New York, accessed October 9, 2015, http://www.binghamton-ny.gov/history; Sedaris, “Get Your Ya-Yas Out!” and “Remembering My Childhood On The Continent of Africa,” in Me Talk Pretty One Day, 197.
11. Sedaris, “Memory Laps,” in Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls (Boston: Little, Brown, 2013), 27–28. The Carolina Country Club admitted its first African American members in 2013. “Carolina Country Club Admits Its First African-American Couple,” News & Observer, July 8, 2013, http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/midtown-raleigh-news/article10275806.html.
12. See, for instance, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, eds. E. D. Hirsch Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 355.
13. Cobb, Away Down South, 215; John Shelton Reed, Southerners: The Social Psychology of Sectionalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 96–99, 72–77; W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 67; Reed, “Our Kind of Yankee,” Southern Cultures 9, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 15; Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877–1984 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 67.
14. Cobb, Away Down South, 214; Jon Smith, “Southern Culture on the Skids: Punk, Retro, Narcissism, and the Burden of Southern History,” in Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith, eds., South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2002), 79; Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 3–4.
15. St. John, “Turning Sour Grapes Into A Silk Purse”; St. John, “Turning Sour Grapes Into A Silk Purse”; “My Grammys: Weird Al, David Sedaris and More Remember the Big Night,” Rolling Stone, February 3, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/my-grammys-weird-al-david-sedaris-and-more-remember-the-big-night-20150203.
16. David Sedaris, “You Can’t Kill the Rooster,” The David Sedaris Box Set [Audio CD] (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2002); Sedaris, Naked, 81–82. For a recording of Sedaris reading this story, see “I Like Guys,” from “The Cruelty of Children,” This American Life, National Public Radio, June 21, 1996, accessed October 9, 2015, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/27/the-cruelty-of-children.
17. Sedaris, Naked, 87–88, 94.
18. Romine, The Real South, 11.