Personal Souths: Interviews from the Southern Quarterly

Personal Souths, a collection of twenty literary interviews with famous southern writers, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Southern Quarterly, one of the oldest scholarly journals (founded in 1962) dedicated to southern studies. The writers range from Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams (all interviewed in the 1970s), to a Whos-Who of southern literature in the second half of the twentieth century. All of these interviews were originally published in the journal in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and are collected here for the first time. The South is represented broadly, with writers from nine states: at least four represent the "mountain South" (Donald Harington, Bobbie Ann Mason, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith), while another four typify a "cosmopolitan South" (Reynolds Price, Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Spencer, Tennessee Williams). The greatest number of voices, at least eight of the writers, speak for or from the "poor white South" (Larry Brown, Erskine Caldwell, Harry Crews, Donald Harington, Bobbie Ann Mason, Robert Morgan, Del Shores, Lee Smith). Of the seventy literary interviews published in the journal in the past thirty years, only one was with an African American writer, Ernest J. Gaines, included here. Several other interviews (Larry Brown, Ellen Douglas, William Styron) consider issues of race, and Styron (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Confessions of Nat Turner) focuses on a conversation about African American literature. It is a testament to the quality of the Southern Quarterly that many of these writers, when discussing their most important contemporaries, often refer to other writers whose interviews are also in this collection.