For the Record: A Robert Drake Reader

More than just a collection of stories and essays by beloved writer Robert Drake, For the Record: A Robert Drake Reader is an introduction to the craft and art of short-story writing, as the stories are accompanied by analyses of Drake as a short story writer and essayist.

In addition to being a text on short story writing, the stories in For the Record provide a social history of Woodville, a small town in West Tennessee. Though the life, both tragic and comic, presented in these stories is vanished, it was for the most part responsible for tempering the shape and character of the New South. Understanding Woodville helps the reader understand the tensions and struggles of the contemporary South.

The volume includes an excellent introduction to the short stories as well as an excellent discussion of Drake’s use of language. His use of language is perhaps Drake’s greatest legacy—no writer alive today has an ear so attuned to capturing the color and rhythm of human speech.

Finally, included in this volume is an exclusive interview with Robert Drake on life, writing, and reading.

Randy Hendricks teaches English at the State University of West Georgia. He is the author of Lonelier than God: Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Exile.

James A. Perkins is professor of English at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. He has been an NEH Fellow at Yale University, New York University, and Princeton University, and was awarded a Fulbright in 1998. He is also an award-winning poet. His previous publications include Snakes, Butterbeans, and the Discovery of Electricity, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: Three Stage Versions which he coedited with James Grimshaw.

Hendricks and Perkins were both graduate students of Drake at the University of Tennessee.