NEW 'OXFORD BOOK OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH' HIGHLIGHTS
A CENTURIES-LONG CONVERSATION

	CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Feb. 12 -- A forthcoming book edited by
a University of Virginia historian and a Southern writer offers a
unique approach to the story of the American South.  It interweaves
key pieces of Southern fiction with an extensive array of selections
from diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, essays and journalism, mostly
by Southerners, about the region over the last 200 years. 
	The resulting "Oxford Book of the American South," edited by
professor Edward L. Ayers and Baton Rouge writer and political
consultant Bradley Mittendorf, has many voices speaking as part of
what Ayers believes most Southern writing to be:  "an on-going
conversation about the past and the place that continues right up to
the present. Each generation, black and white together, tries to tell
the story."
	The book begins with a haunting 1791 travel account by
botanist William Bartram through pastoral Cherokee country and closes
with an equally haunting contemporary slice from "Mississippi: An
American Journey" by Anthony Walton.  In between, such renowned
authors such as James Agee, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Lee Smith,
Walker Percy, Willie Morris, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren and
Flannery O'Connor appear, but so do less famous ones who make powerful
contributions to the "conversation," such as Harriet Jacobs, whose
"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" is recognized as one of the
most illuminating narratives of a former slave. 
	When Ayers, who has taught the history and culture of the
South at U.Va. since 1980, was approached by Oxford University Press
to compile a reader about the South in its respected series of
anthologies, he knew the honor also presented a formidable challenge
for any one person. Because there is so much intense writing, both
well known and less well known, by Southerners about the region, he
asked Mittendorf, a doctoral candidate in Southern history at U.Va.,
to join him in the enterprise. 
	They first drew up a lengthy list of some obvious writers and
works to read and re-read for appropriate selections -- William
Faulkner, Alice Walker, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, for
example -- and then explored through the many less well-known works
that teachers and scholars have found invaluable in recent years.  "I
can't say we knew we would include any single passage beforehand,"
recalls Ayers.  They wound up faced with a stack of photocopies
several feet tall. 
	Wanting to accurately represent the rich and varied record of
the complexity of life in the South within a manageable number of
pages (some 600 finally), they made some hard choices, excluding such
genres as poetry, folklore and professional history. They also
acknowledge leaving out many gifted writers and famous works in their
search for selections that emphasized a constant internal "tension" in
the conversation. 
	The editors also devised a creative organization, knowing that
strict chronological order might be dry.  Within each of four
sections, to which they contribute brief introductions -- "The Old
South," "The Civil War and Its Consequences," "Hard Times" (from World
War I through the Great Depression) and "Turning" (from approximately
1940 to present) -- they begin with accounts of those experiencing the
period firsthand and then bring in the voices of later writers
reflecting on the same times and themes.
	The antebellum period gives the perspective of such
contemporaries as Jefferson and Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, and
then authors who imagined the period later, including William Styron
and Sherley Anne Williams.  The Civil War is seen by eyewitnesses such
as diarist Sarah Morgan and through later writers trying to make sense
of the conflict such as W.E.B. Du Bois or those using the war's
intense passions to fuel their fiction such as Margaret Mitchell in
"Gone With the Wind." 
	Finally such works as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From
Birmingham Jail," novelist (and U.Va. English professor) George
Garrett's classic story "Good-bye, Good-bye, Be Always Kind and True,"
and Peter Taylor's "The Decline and Fall of the Episcopal Church in
the Year of Our Lord 1952" shed light on the region during the
dramatic years of the Civil Rights movement and post-World War II
modernization. 
	Ayers, a native of Tennessee whose 1992 "The Promise of the
New South" was named the best book on the history of the South that
year and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the
Pulitzer Prize, notes that at the turn of the 20th century much
writing from and about the South was ridiculed outside the region.
But, "things are different now." 
	Not only did the 20th century seem miraculously to produce a
major cast of internationally renowned Southern writers, but scholars
in recent years have recovered significant pre-20th century writings
that tell about the Southern experience. "Faced with more brilliant
writing than we could possibly contain between the pages of a single
volume," Ayers and Mittendorf write, "we have tried to create a
unified book rather than a mere series of readings, a portrait of a
society unfolding in time....Because certain passions have surfaced
time and again in more than 200 years of Southern writing, we have
chosen readings that express those passions: the complexities of race,
the fierceness and solace of religious faith, the absurdity and
hilarity of everyday life, the temptations and consequences of
violence, the entanglements of family, the distances that separate the
rich people from the poor, the ambivalence toward the outside world,
and the tenaciousness of memory." 
	Subtitled "Testimony, Memory and Fiction," the book, like much
of Southern writing, "is about memory, about imagining and reimagining
the past," Ayers says. "The fiction often has the ring of memory, and
the nonfiction the qualities of good fiction.....Sometimes the
similarities and continuities across the years are remarkable; at
other times it is the silence and contempt that stand out.
	"Some writers celebrate the South; others speak with
bitterness, disappointment or anger. Regardless of their time, all of
the authors here speak of the South with a sense of wonder." 
The editors also say no honest book about the South can avoid risking
controversy, in part because race has been such a major factor in the
Southern experience. They elected to include some passages revealing
racism and bitterness in order to give a true picture of the region.
But they also tried to show what Ayers believes are "moments of
redemption than can appear," as in selections from Ernest J. Gaines,
Martin Luther King, James Alan MacPherson, or novelist Harry Crews's
autobiographical remembering of a young black boy and white boy
inventing a story together as they pore through a Sears catalogue.
###
February 11, 1997
	Review copies of "The Oxford Book of the American South" are
available from Oxford University Press at 212-726-6033 or by fax at
212-726-6447.  Edward Ayers may be reached at 804-924-7585 or by
e-mail at ela@virginia.edu.  Bradley Mittendorf may be reached at
504-344 2944.  Television reporters should call our TV News Office at
804-924-7550.