Voices of the South
I should probably be writing about the ways that e-books and on-demand printing promise to permanently alter the publishing industry, but here I am still thinking about the paperback book and the revolutions it wrought — how it brought more authors into the fold, how paperbacks are easily passed around among friends, how they can be tucked into a briefcase or purse to be brought out for use during the lunch hour. They feel easier, though that’s not necessarily the case. Yes, here I am, apparently in my dimly lit cave, feeling guilty for relishing in nostalgia. I blame LSU Press. Since 1994, their Voices of the South series has been reprinting in paperback some of the most important (and often neglected) Southern writers, writers who tend to get rave reviews in all the right places and then, several years later, find that their books are suddenly out of print. There are the big names in the series, like Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Erskine Caldwell, and Allen Tate and the more recent ones who have written those “modern classics” that explore previously unmapped corners of the South or present the whole terrain all over again: Shirley Ann Grau, Percival Everett, Fred Chappell, Texan Beverly Lowry, and Sheila Bosworth (among approximately 40 others). LSU Press, which has had a long tradition of specializing in scholarly books about the South, publishes eight Voices of the South books a year — this season’s include James Wilcox‘s comic novel North Gladiola, Lowry’s Come Back, Lolly Ray, This Crooked Way by Elizabeth Spencer, and Wolfe’s The Hills Beyond, a collection of 11 pieces that were culled from the manuscripts Wolfe left behind after his early death in 1938 at the age of 38. Here, in “The Lost Boy,” which re-figures the death of young Grover Gant from Look Homeward, Angel, is Wolfe’s old obsession with time and poetic synchronicity: “Light came and went and came again, the booming strokes of three o’clock beat out across the town in thronging bronze from the courthouse bell, light winds of April blew the fountain out in rainbow sheets, until the plume returned and pulsed, as Grover turned into the Square.” All that, just for a boy entering the square. Wolfe always felt like inviting the entire universe into his fiction.
The series came about because Les Phillabaum, the director of LSU Press, began to realize that very few of Robert Penn Warren’s novels were still in print. All the King’s Men has always remained in print, but whatever happened to Band of Angels or World Enough and Time? It seemed inconceivable to him, so he started publishing a series.
John Easterly, executive editor at LSU Press, uses Bosworth’s first novel Almost Innocent as an example: “It had only been in paperback for about a year before it was out of print. … This was something that played into [Phillabaum’s] thinking about how we could boost our sales and revenue by starting a series of books that bring back these very well-known, almost classic, novels of Southern fiction and at the same time provide the kind of service that a university press is supposed to provide, which is to keep good books in print.”
This article appears in June 30 • 2000.