“I don’t have much patience with folks who say the Civil War was not about slavery.” Editor’s note: On a Saturday afternoon in August 2000, John Reed sat down for a conversation with Betsey and Gene Genovese, noted historians of the South, at their home in Atlanta. The tape recorder was turned on— JOHN SHELTON »
“Even as he turned to a form of largely conservative cultural commentary on all sorts of things, Reed retained a keen sociological consciousness.” Some months ago, I gave a talk on the American South at the University of Mississippi. During the question-and-answer session that followed, a southern historian noted the prominence of the “ubiquitous” (his »
“Reed burst on the southern scene in 1972 as a contrarian, and, as we know, he has remained very much a contrarian to this day.” Any understanding of John Shelton Reed’s legacy to the study of southern history should begin with an appreciation of his pivotal position within modern southern intellectual history itself. Reed burst »
“‘Southerners can’t grasp anything that isn’t couched in a Br’er Rabbit tale. They got cornmeal mush for brains.’” Epigraphs Assignment: In the epigraphs below, kindly circle the terms associated with abstraction, generality, anywhere, anyone, and Platonic idealism, and underline those associated with concretion, particularity, somewhere, someone, and Aristotelian materialism. The ideology of New Criticism began »
“The object of John’s climb is what is presumed to be a coon nestled among the giant sweet gum’s topmost branches.” When it comes to milking an anecdote, John Reed has no equal and few competitors. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin an essay about his work with a story. In one of his best-known »
“It is the illusion of his style that Reed is a sort of good old boy, sitting on his porch, swigging his whiskey, going out the back to shoot hapless mammals.” I am commissioned here to discuss the influence of John Shelton Reed. But on whom? On historians of the American South, like myself? I »
“Nobody enjoys getting his tongue extended far into his cheek more than Reed, and few have such a reach.” As a fiction writer, I used to complain that sociology was the academic discipline most opposite, in some cases even most inimical, to literature. After all, the average sociologist seemed to conduct boring surveys that led »
“Daddy said he wouldn’t go to church, so she shot him.” They are hastily put-together things, often arriving here on the front lines in used envelopes with the flaps re-taped. Sometimes they arrive postage due. The notes inside occasionally reflect a disdain for punctuation and a distinct irreverence toward spelling. They boast of shared ancestry, »
“As scholars and laymen alike struggle to determine what, if anything, constitutes the surviving essence of southernness, a close analysis of southern humor suggests that, contrary to our insistence on the seriousness of our endeavors, the search for new insights into the southern identity may well prove to be a laughing matter after all.” As »
“My point is not so much that a Mississippi story is better than a Michigan story, of course. Such is not always true, obviously. Besides, Eudora Welty could write circles around Ring Lardner on any terrain. But her region, so populous with talk, gives her an obnoxious advantage, one which she exercises with complete skill »
“‘What is that humor, you are wondering? Gentlemen, kindly cover your ears.’” Southern women’s humor. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, like southern scrod or southern intellectual history. Men are the ones who tell jokes, after all; you don’t see men fall into confusion in the middle of a story and say, »
“For situations that are frequently life threatening, it is at times hard to imagine guffaws associated with them. Yet black people managed to create the essence of the blues—to laugh to keep from crying—in and about a land that was as much hell as it was home.” Black folks in the South. Black folks and »