For our 21c Fiction Issue, we consulted crackerjack writer, illustrator, and sleuth Daniel Wallace. The Big Fish traipsed around the Smoky Mountains and a hole somewhere in Alabama, and consulted with a cat named Eudora Welty and a writerly dog named Jake to create for us these “Lesser-Known 21st-Century Southern Writers.” Jimmy Pringle The Hopewell Sisters Mrs. Sedgewick and »
Art
GENE First day of July I was thumbing the Caneville Road. I’d walked off another of Brother’s clean-up jobs, mine sludge up to my pant pockets, throat raw, hands itching and broke out. For eight dollars an hour I told him I couldn’t do it. Told him I’d walk back to Canard. He didn’t like »
University of Arkansas Press, 1993. Graphic Arts & the South is an important addition to a sorely neglected field of study. Substituting the breadth of a monograph with the critical focus of nine illuminating, if uneven, essays, this collection showcases the work of leading scholars in art history and American cultural history. Graphic Arts & »
While researching his 1885 biography of Edgar Allan Poe for Houghton Mifflin’s American Men of Letters series, George E. Woodberry discovered that Poe had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1827 under the name of Edgar Perry. As is now well known, Poe was shipped to Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, a barrier island on Charleston »
At the age of 51, Jesse Whitaker began drawing pencil sketches of his memories of being a schoolboy in eastern North Carolina. The collection of his sketches that follows and his accompanying thoughts about the events taking place during that time are vehicles through which southerners can understand his life and his sense of place »
All the time I was growing up in Statesville, I never went to an art museum. There was none; the weekly art teacher in public schools contented herself with the color wheel and the hope of proportiante good likenesses. What hung in my own home were not paintings but illustrations: Columbus’s three ships, that wolf »
“But perhaps the greatest discovery for me was the city of Raleigh itself.” In 1962 I entered North Carolina State in engineering. I had attended Emory College at Oxford, Georgia, for one year, but since I did not have a high school diploma, State ranked me as a freshman. I was a farm boy from »
Memoir
Each year our elementary school class took a field trip to the North Carolina Museum of Art. To prepare us for our visit, the board of education sent us a roving arts ambassador, a trained cultural cheerleader. To our fifth-grade class this person arrived in the form of one Mrs. Kingman. This was a woman »
Poetry
What shadows my happiness? The boy and calf so linked by a rope seem to forget all else. Grass recedes to the horizonand chickens roam free. Hay stacked richly as memory bulges mountainously on the sky.
“In such heat, this mission sickened him. The killing had been simple, it felt country-necessary, country-right.” And, verily, the head did weigh twenty-seven pounds. And to hold it before him—as you would lift a lantern—costs the young David much strength. Was not his day’s strength already well used by killing so great a warrior? Trumpets »
Hill Street Press, 1999 Each reproduction in The Lines Are Drawn is a gem in itself, documenting such familiar themes as wartime inflation and scarcity in the Confederacy, northern Copperheadism, and the iconographic rise of Abraham Lincoln and Uncle Sam. In all, Kristen M. Smith has collected 138 cartoons, comics, and caricatures related to the »