Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South - Hardcover

Crowther, Hal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807125946 ISBN 13: 9780807125946

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 2000

Synopsis

Foreword by Fred Hobson and illustrations by Steven Cragg. Hal Crowther prides himself on being one of the last generalists in a professon of specialists. His eloquent essays on culture, history, politics, religion, arts, and literature have established him as one of the most influential Southern journalists of his generation. Cathedrals of Kudzu represents his ambition to "cover" the South-"its writers, politicians, geniuses, saints, villains, and eccentric folkways-with the same wide-angle lens H. L. Mencken used to capture all of America in the 1920s. To cover it, in other words, from a judicious distance, but with the ironical bite of his own not inconsiderable prejudices. "Like Mencken," reads Crowther's citation for the 1992 H. L. Mencken Writing Award, "Hal Crowther has the narrowed pupil of a sharpshooter, the hairy ear of a heavy artilleryman, and the ballistic rifling of an implacable anathematist."

In these superb essays, most of them first published in The Oxford American, he sorts out a whole warehouse of Southern idiosyncrasy and iconography, including the Southern belle, Faulkner, James Dickey, Stonewall Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy, Erskine Caldwell, guns, dogs, fathers, trees, George Wallace, Elvis, Doc Watson, the decline of poetry, and the return of chain gangs. Unlike Mencken, who was incorrigibly cynical about his subjects, Crowther is capable of affectionate, even sentimental, concessions-even to some of the most dubious players who cross his stage.

These are very personal essays, though they include a wealth of reporting and research. They're conversations with the reader, who is invited to bring his or her experience and prejudice to the topic at hand. There's no quarter given, but no ideological orthodoxies to reassure one faction or alienate another. Crowther is an intellectual free agent. In his essays, the book page and the editorial page find common ground.

Taken as a whole, Hal Crowther's pieces offer a portrait of the modern South with a rich backdrop of its history and its classic literature. More personally, they present a vivid intellectual self-portrait of the man Kirkpatrick Sale has called "the best essayist working in journalism today."

About this title

About the Author:

Hal Crowther has been nationally recognized for his reporting on the South, winning both the H.L. Mencken Award for Writing and first prize from the Association of Newsweeklies for political commentary. A former editor and critic for Time and Newsweek, a screenwriter, on weekdays a prizewinning syndicated columnist, Hal Crowther devotes his essays in the bimonthly Oxford American to Southern manners and letters.

From Publishers Weekly:

In his foreword Fred Hobson dubs North Carolinian Crowther "a throwback" who resembles the best literary journalists of the early 1900s more than contemporary essayists. Indeed the self-described "born Luddite, anchorite, forest hermit, destroyer of telephones" is an uncommon essayist: a moralist, a widely read generalist, a modern-day Mencken who never hesitates to offend when extolling the virtues or probing the flaws of his favorite subject, the South. These 29 essays (many first published in the Oxford American) skillfully blend the personal and the polemical, experience and reportage, high culture and low, the spiritual and the secular. Crowther's range is best displayed in "God's Holy Fire," which takes to task no less an impressive cast than novelist Reynolds Price, Martin Luther, Kierkegaard, God and the New York Times Book Review. In "The King and I," his uncertain regard for Elvis becomes a touchstone for exploring what's wrong with contemporary America (a recurring theme). Even bemoaning our sorry state, Crowther writes with saving wit and flair, deploring "the Graceland Cult as the state religion of the degenerate 'voodoo republic' that is replacing Mr. Jefferson's dignified democracy." Crowther brings both native insight and objective detachment to his analysis of the South's writers (James Dickey, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy), heroes (Stonewall Jackson, George Wallace and Wallace's nemesis, Judge Frank Johnson) and icons (belles, yahoos, radio evangelists). "We'll soon be anachronisms, subjects like me," he allows. But if Crowther is a throwback, he's also a keeperAand likely the best essayist you've never heard of. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0807125946
• ISBN 13: 9780807125946
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 177
• Illustrator: Cragg Steven