Frye Gaillard – författare

Prophet from Plains covers Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter's major achievements and setbacks in light of what has been at once his greatest asset and his greatest flaw: his stubborn, faith-driven integrity. Carter's remarkable postpresidency is still in the making; however, he has already redefined the role for all who follow him.Frye Gaillard, who wrote extensively about Carter at the Charlotte Observer, was among the first to take the Carter postpresidency seriously and to challenge many accepted conclusions about Carter's term in office. Carter was not an irresolute president, says Gaillard, but rather one so certain of his own rectitude that he misjudged the importance of "selling" himself to America. Ranging across the highs and lows of the Carter presidency, Gaillard covers the energy crisis, the Iran hostage situation, the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal and other treaties, and the new diplomatic emphasis on human rights.Carter's established priorities did not change once he was out of office, but he was far more effective outside the strictures of presidential politics. Gaillard's coverage of this period includes Carter's friendship with Gerald R. Ford, his work through the Carter Center on disease control and election monitoring, and his association with Habitat for Humanity.Prophet from Plains locates Carter in the tradition of Old Testament prophets who took uncompromising stands for peace and justice. Resisting the role of an above-the-fray elder statesman, Carter has thrust himself into international controversies in ways that some find meddlesome and others heroic.

For years the legendary John Seigenthaler hosted A Word on Words on Nashville's public television station, WNPT. During the show’s four-decade run (1972 to 2013), he interviewed some of the most interesting and most impor­tant writers of our time. These in-depth exchanges revealed much about the writers who appeared on his show and gave a glimpse into their creative pro­cesses. Seigenthaler was a deeply engaged reader and a generous interviewer, a true craftsman. Frye Gaillard and Pat Toomay have collected and transcribed some of the iconic interactions from the show.Featuring interviews with:Arna Bontemps • Marshall Chapman • Pat Conroy • Rodney Crowell • John Egerton • Jesse Hill Ford • Charles Fountain • William Price Fox • Kinky Friedman • Frye Gaillard • Nikki Giovanni • Doris Kearns Goodwin • David Halberstam • Waylon Jennings • John Lewis • David Maraniss • William Marshall • Jon Meacham • Ann Patchett • Alice Randall • Dori Sanders • John Seigenthaler Sr. • Marty Stuart • Pat Toomay

With Music and Justice for All is a collection of Frye Gaillard's most compelling work, one writer's odyssey though a time and place. There are stories here of the civil rights movement, a moral, social and political upheaval that changed the South in so many ways. Gaillard has captured the essence of that drama by giving it a face - telling the stories of the ordinary people, as well as the icons. In the course of these pages, the reader not only meets Dr. Martin Luther King, but also the lesser known heroes such Perry Wallace - the first African American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference and Thomas Gilmore, the first black sheriff in one of the toughest counties in the Alabama Black Belt, a man of non-violence, who refused, in deference to the fallen Dr. King, to carry a gun during the thirteen years he served as sheriff.

Jimmy Carter’s expansive body of writing ranges across the genres of memoir, commentary, children’s literature, poetry, and a novel about the Revolutionary War. Editors Mark I. West and Frye Gaillard have assembled a group of award-winning journalists, poets, historians, and literary scholars to reflect on this substantial – and to some, unexpected – dimension of Carter’s legacy. Collectively, these essays, including several by the editors themselves, document a through-line of ethical integrity, perspective, and insight that runs through Carter’s writing – from his controversial trilogy on peace in the Middle East to his personal reflections on his Georgia boyhood. Carter never used a ghost writer. As a result, his distinct voice and point of view comes through in every book that he published.

The Dream Long Deferred tells the fifty-year story of the landmark struggle for the desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the present state of the city's public school system. Gaillard, who covered school integration for the Charlotte Observer, updates his earlier 1988 and 1999 editions of this work to examine the difficult circumstances of the present day. Charlotte began voluntary desegregation in 1957, but the slow pace lead to lawsuits to demand immediate and complete integration. When the U.S. District Court in 1969, and subsequently the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, upheld that demand in the landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Charlotte became the national test case for busing. Within five years, Charlotte was a model of successful integration. In 1999, a group of white citizens reopened the case to push for a return to neighborhood schools. A federal judge sided with them, finding that the plans initiated in the 1971 ruling were both unnecessary and unconstitutional because they were race-based. Today, Gaillard explains, Charlotte's schools are becoming segregated once more - this time along both economic and racial lines. In this new edition of ""The Dream Long Deferred"", Gaillard chronicles the span of Charlotte's five-decade struggle with race in education to remind us that the national dilemma of equal educational opportunity remains unsettled.

Originally published 25 years ago, Watermelon Wine was praised for its honest, unsentimental examination of the compassion as well as the passion behind authentic country music. Author Frye Gaillard looked at the commercialization of the Grand Ole Opry; the tradition-minded rebels such as Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, and Tompall Glaser; the growing divide between country and folk music; how Johnny Cash inspired new songwriters and new ideas; how the changing relationships between men and women were affecting the music; the role of God and gospel; and Southern rock’s increasing influence. A quarter-century later, the essays in the book seem prophetic and in many cases have become even more relevant. A new introduction by Nashville music journalist Peter Cooper and a new afterword by the author update the book’s themes and show what has happened to its personalities.

Finalist for the 2016 Foreword Indies Best Book Award — Juvenile FictionWinner of the Jefferson Cup Honor Book AwardFinalist for the Housatonic Book AwardMore than twenty years ago, Robert Croshon, an elderly friend of Frye Gaillard's, told him the story of Croshon's ancestor, Gilbert Fields, an African-born slave in Georgia who led his family on a daring flight to freedom. Fields and his family ran away intending to travel north, but clouds obscured the stars and when morning came Fields discovered they had been running south instead. They had no choice but to seek sanctuary with the Seminole Indians of Florida and later a community of free blacks in Mobile.With Croshon's blessing, Gaillard has expanded this oral history into a novel for young readers, weaving the story of Gilbert Fields through the nearly forgotten history of the Seminoles and their alliance with runaway slaves. As Gaillard's narrative makes clear, the Seminole Wars of the 1830s, in which Indians fought side by side with former slaves, represents the largest slave uprising in American history. Gaillard also puts a human face on the story of free blacks before the Civil War and the lives they painfully built for themselves in Mobile. Hauntingly illustrated by artist Anne Kent Rush, Go South to Freedom is a gripping story for readers of any age.

“There are many different ways to remember the sixties,” Frye Gaillard writes, “and this is mine. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer’s reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era—one that, for better or worse, lives with us still.” With A Hard Rain Gaillard gives us a deeply personal history, bringing his keen storyteller’s eye to this pivotal time in American life. He explores the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope through the political and social movements of the times: civil rights, black power, women’s liberation, the war in Vietnam, and the protests movements against it. Gaillard also examines the cultural manifestations of change in the era—music, literature, art, religion, and science—and so we meet not only the Brothers Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, but also Gloria Steinem, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Harper Lee, Mister Rogers, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Billy Graham, Thomas Merton, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Angela Davis, Barry Goldwater, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Berrigan Brothers. As Gaillard remembers these influential people, he weaves together a compelling story about an iconic American decade of change, conflict, and progress.

In 1870 Benjamin Turner, who spent the first 40 years of his life as a slave, was elected to the U.S. Congress. He was the first African American from Alabama to earn that distinction. In a recreation of Turner's own words, based on speeches and other writings that Turner left behind, co-authors Marti S. Rosner and Frye Gaillard have crafted the story of a remarkable man who taught himself to read when he was young and began a lifetime quest for education and freedom. As a candidate for Congress, and then as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Turner rejected the idea of punishing his white neighbors who fought for the Confederacy—and thus for the continuation of slavery—believing they had suffered enough. At the same time, he supported the right to vote for former slaves, opposed a cotton tax that he thought was hurtful to small and especially black farmers, supported racially mixed schools, and argued that land should be set aside for former slaves so they could build a new life for themselves. In this bicentennial season for the state of Alabama, the authors celebrate the life of a man who rejected bitterness even as he pursued his own dreams. His is a story of determination and strength, the story of an American hero from the town of Selma, Alabama, who worked to make the world a better place for people of all races and backgrounds.

Beginning in the South Carolina Low Country with his Huguenot ancestors who fled religious persecution in Europe, journalist-historian Frye Gaillard traces his family through the troubled, oppressive history of the South. Gaillard, who came of age during the civil rights years, shares the painful legacy of a family sometimes on the wrong side of that history. He writes of Capt. Peter Gaillard, who fought in the Revolutionary War (on both sides), and became a prosperous planter and slave-owner. The author follows the family story through the major events of Southern history—the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil rights revolution—to show how a family’s identity was forged by privilege, hardship, and loss, and also by a moral reckoning that emerged slowly, inevitably over time. A powerful memoir that is sure to speak to the heart of every Southerner. Researched with Dr. Nancy Gaillard, educator and wife of the author.

“There are many different ways to remember the sixties,” Frye Gaillard writes, “and this is mine. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives. As future generations debate the meaning of the decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer’s reconstruction and remembrance of a transcendent era—one that, for better or worse, lives with us still.” With A Hard Rain Gaillard gives us a deeply personal history, bringing his keen storyteller’s eye to this pivotal time in American life. He explores the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope through the political and social movements of the times: civil rights, black power, women’s liberation, the war in Vietnam, and the protests movements against it. Gaillard also examines the cultural manifestations of change in the era—music, literature, art, religion, and science—and so we meet not only the Brothers Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, but also Gloria Steinem, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Harper Lee, Mister Rogers, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Billy Graham, Thomas Merton, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Angela Davis, Barry Goldwater, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Berrigan Brothers. As Gaillard remembers these influential people, he weaves together a compelling story about an iconic American decade of change, conflict, and progress.

Frye Gaillard did not set out to write this book. One day as he was thumbing through a cardboard box of his essays, columns, and profiles, he simply realized that he had done it. Each article told the story of a person standing against social injustice or exploring the pain and ambiguity of the human condition. By blending interviews and stories of well-known figures like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Sidney Poitier, Vine Deloria, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Jane Goodall with lesser-known heroes like Rabbi Abraham Heschel (who marched from Selma to Montgomery), Regina Benjamin (a Black doctor who was integral to the grassroots efforts of Katrina recovery), Kathy Mattea (who wrote powerful songs about coal mining and its real effects on the people of Appalachia), and Elyn Saks (who pioneered modern mental illness treatments while dealing with her own schizophrenia), Gaillard celebrates the people who have tried to make things better. While many of Gaillard’s subjects succeeded in what they were trying to do, others did not. Each story, however, contains a measure of inspiration. Against the backdrop of our turbulent time—our era of lesser angels on the rise—Gaillard asks, where would the rest of us be without them?

Pulitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker and award-winning author Frye Gaillard reflect in a powerful series of essays on the role of the South in America’s long descent into its present political predicament. In 1974 the great Southern author John Egerton published his pioneering work, The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America, reflecting on the double-edged reality of the South becoming more like the rest of the country and vice versa. Tucker and Gaillard dive even deeper into that reality from the time that Egerton published his book until the present. They see the dark side—the morphing of the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party of today. They explore the roots of the racial backlash against President Obama; the specter of family separation on our southern border, with its echoes of similar separations in the era of slavery; as well as the rise of the Christian right, the demonstrations in Charlottesville, the death of George Floyd, and the attack on our nation’s capital—all of which, they argue, have roots that trace their way to the South. But Tucker and Gaillard see another side too—a legacy rooted in the civil rights years that has given us political leaders like John Lewis, Jimmy Carter, Raphael Warnock, and Stacey Abrams. The authors raise the ironic possibility that the South, regarded by some as the heart of the country’s systemic racism, might lead the way on the path to redemption. Tucker and Gaillard bring a multiracial perspective and years of political reporting to bear on a critical moment in American history, a time of racial reckoning and of democracy under siege.