The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, eds., ISI Books. A year ago, when my wife and I were waiting for a flight out of Logan Airport, a roughhewn man of about 60 was sitting a few seats away from us reading a book I would have been surprised [...]
If original sin lies at the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s work, redemption lurks out there somewhere too. In 1989, the year before his death, the great Southern novelist Walker Percy wrote a letter to rock-and-roll legend Bruce Springsteen, which read, in part: This is a fan letter—of sorts. I’ve always been an admirer of yours, [...]
Wendell Berry is a philosopher, and an important one in this postmodern era, who utilizes the essay, the poem, and, most importantly, the novel, to express his observations of concrete human beings and their life in community. It is in his novels, purposefully located in an agrarian setting, that he depicts the intrinsic interdependency of the [...]
Business Insider caused a sensation with its list “The Most Famous Book Set In Every State.” And when we say “sensation,” we mean “shock and anger.” While some of their picks are obvious, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for Kansas or To Kill a Mockingbird for Alabama, others provoked more consternation. Does Louisiana deserve to [...]
Years ago, perhaps when I was still in graduate school, I stopped at a Chattanooga used bookshop when passing through. One has a mental list of authors to check, and I happened to find an uncommon thing: a hardcover first edition of Wendell Berry’s 1970 book on race and the South, The Hidden Wound. The disappointment [...]
The use of criticism as T.S. Eliot sees that use in his Harvard lectures in 1932-1933 is to discover the degree of a proper accommodation of the poet as a person to his work, in a just judgment of both poet and poem. The judgment is not so limited as it had seemed in 1920 [...]
Even “academic” specialization might be recovered as desirable, but desirable as a means to a higher end in service to the body of community, not merely servicing the appetitive order of individuals collectively called society, but in service to the community as a body of members. In that term society the nature of community, as [...]
Is the Second Reconstruction over? The first ended with the withdrawal of Union troops from the Southern states as part of a deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency after the disputed election of 1876. The second began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a century after Appomattox. Under the VRA, Southern states [...]
Thoughts on The Mind of the South, by W. J. Cash W. J. Cash follows Mencken–and genuine Southern Stoics such as the poet William Alexander Percy–in having a very poor opinion of the uneducated individualism and raw emotion of Southern religion. It is, as Will Percy said, for “white trash” and for “Negroes” [...]
M.E. Bradford was was truly one of the giants of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. A Southerner first, he was naturally both an agrarian and a conservative. The late M.E. (“Mel”) Bradford (1934-1993) was truly one of the giants of the postwar conservative intellectual movement. A Texan (born in Fort Worth), Bradford earned his B.A. [...]
Donald Davidson Confident that industrial prosperity would create the material foundations for a vigorous, democratic civilization in the South, southern liberals since the 1880s had repudiated much of their heritage and embraced science and industry as the salvation of mankind. Liberal educators, journalists, and social scientists of the immediate postwar era, such as [...]
The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age by Marion Montgomery (in three volumes): Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home (1981), Why Poe Drank Liquor (1983), Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy (1984) Marion Montgomery’s trilogy is an ambitious, indeed audacious, assessment of the social, political, literary, religions, and philosophical temper of the Western world since the [...]
Gaston County and the county seat of Gastonia, located in the southwestern part of North Carolina, bear his name, a fitting tribute to the easterner who came to support the rights of his western brethren. In his day, his legal acumen was hailed by none other than the great Luther Martin of Maryland, perhaps the [...]
In 1941 the Prairie Farmer, America’s oldest farm periodical, celebrated its one hundredth anniversary. The centennial cover features a drawing of the iconic twentieth-century “new” farmer: tall, young, and slender. Bulky overalls have given way to tailored city clothes; the straw hat to a fedora. In the artist’s words, he is “a strong, virile, keen, [...]