Willie Morris - Böcker

Carol Hollywell is beautiful, smart, elegant, and charming. A debutante from De Soto Point, Arkansas, and a recent graduate of Ole Miss, she is heir to a good southern name and a small southern fortune. She knows what she wants and, more important, knows how to get it. She is, in other words, the prototypical southern belle, a Scarlett O'Hara for the 1950s, and when she moves to Washington, D.C., in 1957, she sets the town on its ear.Willie Morris' cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed novel (loosely based on a real-life figure) follows this headstrong woman from her arrival at the Capital and traces the ups and downs of her life in the political and social whirl of the city over the next decade and a half. Eventually, she becomes romantically involved with a prominent congressman, an idealist, a reformer, a man perhaps headed for the very pinnacle of political life. It is at first a dazzling alliance, yet the genuine satisfactions they find in their relationship cannot long withstand the pressures of the ambitions both of them harbor. The very drives that initially brought them together in the end propel their love affair into jeopardy. Morris paints a devastatingly accurate portrait not only of a power-hungry woman but also of the society that feeds such hunger. His descriptions of Washington and its denizens, the politicos, the journalists, the socialites, and the hangers-on, are nothing short of breathtaking.

In this classic portrait of Jews in the South, Eli N. Evans takes readers inside the nexus of southern and Jewish histories, from the earliest immigrants to the present day. Evoking the rhythms and heartbeat of Jewish life in the Bible belt, Evans weaves together chapters of recollections from his youth and early years in North Carolina with chapters that explore the experiences of Jews in many southern cities and small towns. He presents the stories of communities, individuals, and events in this quintessential American landscape, making clear the deeply intertwined strands of southern and Jewish life. First published in 1973 and updated in 1997, The Provincials was one of the first books to survey the history and contributions of Jews in the South. No other book on this subject combines elements of memoir and history in such a compelling way. This edition includes a gallery of more than two dozen family and historical photographs as well as a new introduction by the author.

At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called ""southern.""Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since ""the Troubles"" of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.

In the course of his career Willie Morris (1934-1999) attained national prominence as a journalist, editor, nonfiction writer, novelist, memoirist, and news commentator. As this eloquent book reveals, he was also a master essayist whose gift was in crafting short compositions.Shifting Interludes, an anthology that spans his career of forty years, includes pieces he wrote for the Daily Texan, Texas Observer, the Washington Star, Vanity Fair, Southern Living, and other publications. These diverse works reflect the scope of Morris's wide-ranging interests. The collection comprises biographical profiles, newspaper editorials and columns, political analyses, travel narratives, sports commentaries, book reviews, and his thoughts--both critical and affectionate-about his beloved home state of Mississippi. Two essays are previously unpublished--""A Long-ago Rendezvous with Alger Hiss"" and ""The Day I Followed the Mayor around Town."" One essay, ""Mississippi Rebel on a Texas Campus,"" is the first article he wrote for a national publication.Morris's subjects reflect his autobiography, his poignant feelings, and his courtly manners. He expresses his outrage as he decries Southern racism in ""Despair in Mississippi,"" his melancholy as he recounts a visit to his hometown Yazoo City in ""The Rain Fell Noiselessly,"" his grace as he salutes a college football team and its fallen comrade in ""In the Spirit of the Game,"" his humor as he admits to a bout of middle-age infatuation in ""Mitch and the Infield Fly Rule,"" and his pensiveness as he remembers his much-loved grandmother Mamie in ""Weep No More, My Lady."" Willie Morris is one of Mississippi's most acclaimed writers and a former editor of Harper's. University Press of Mississippi reissued two of his works, North Toward Home and The Courting of Marcus Dupree, and most recently published My Mississippi, on which he collaborated with his son, the photographer David Rae Morris. Jack Bales, the reference and humanities librarian at Mary Washington College and a friend of Morris's, compiled and edited Conversations with Willie Morris (also published by the University Press of Mississippi).

During the three decades since the London Sunday Times trumpeted North Toward Home as ""the finest evocation of an American boyhood since Mark Twain,"" southerner Willie Morris (1934-1999) wrote seventeen other books, including a second well-received volume of autobiography. Throughout his lengthy literary career, which began when he contributed his first sports column to a local newspaper at the age of twelve, he attained national prominence as a journalist, nonfiction writer, novelist, editor, and essayist.Conversations with Willie Morris, the first collection of interviews and profiles devoted to this American author, Jack Bales compiles twenty-five fascinating and incisive conversations (some never before published) with a man who for over forty years confronted the turbulent issues of his generation. ""I have no alternative to words,"" Morris occasionally replied when asked about his far-reaching career. And throughout his life he unceasingly spoke out on matters that concerned him, writing at various times with outrage, humor, sadness, and affection -- but always with passion and candor.The diverse topics covered in this collection reflect the scope of Morris's wide-ranging interests. As he speaks with journalists, public radio and television hosts, social historians, and even a professional comedian, he candidly discusses his own life and literary career, sports, other authors, the 1960s, politics, the Civil War, dogs, the complexities of race relations, and, of course, the South and his beloved Mississippi.After reviewing the author's Homecomings some ten years ago, a Boston Globe writer concluded, ""There's damn fine life left in this man's prose."" As is evident by Willie Morris's eighteen books, countless essays, and the insightful profiles and interviews gathered here, there is little doubt that this man's prose will be remembered as fresh, lively, and thought-provoking.