Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts

Thursday, March 24, 2022

Alabama Prize Stories--1970

As I continue the effort to downsize my book collection, I keep running across interesting tomes that I simply must examine in further detail. This title is one of those.

The book published the winners of a contest sponsored by the Huntsville branch of the American Association of University Women. Nearly 200 entries were received. Judges Elise Sanguinetti, Thomas C. Turner and Oxford Stroud chose the 29  winners, who were all Alabama natives or residents of the state for at least six months. The three judges were published authors of novels and short fiction in addition to their other activities. 

The foreword is signed by "The Publishers", meaning Strode, and expresses the hope that other contests and collections will appear in the future. Apparently none did. Based in Huntsville, Strode was a very active publisher for several decades beginning in the late 1950's. David Strode Akens [1921-2012], also head of the Historical Department at the Marshall Space Flight Center in the 1960's and 1970's, steered the company as it published books on a wide range of topics. 

The collection was edited by O.B. Emerson [1921-1990]. Although born in Tennessee, he settled in Tuscaloosa, where he taught at the University from 1946 until 1986. Much of his own scholarly writing concentrated on William Faulkner and other southern writers. 

Near the beginning of his lengthy introduction Emerson notes the diversity of the collection. "In this volume there are stories of academic life, stories about the Civil War, stories that involve significant relations of Negroes and whites, stories about death, a story concerning the time of Christ. In fact there seems to be no limit to the imagination of Alabama writers. This volume is a tribute to their originality and versatility. The stories vary in tone and style as much as they do in subject matter." In the remainder of his 14-page introduction Emerson discusses each story in some detail. 

I used the "Alabama Authors" database as a measure of achievement and searched for information about all the writers in this collection. I found nine of the 29 individuals. Since Lee Smith, Jesse Hill Ford and H.E. Francis developed significant literary careers, I won't cover them further. The other six are less well known, and I'll discuss them briefly here. The remaining 20 authors would require more extensive research. However, each story in the collection has a biographical note with information about the authors' lives and writings up to 1970.

State native Helen Morgan Akens [1918-2012] taught at Huntingdon, Montevallo and Athens Colleges and served as Dean of Women at Athens. She founded Strode Publishers with her husband David. The story in this collection, "Call Me Ma", is apparently her only published fiction. She also wrote two popular histories  with Virginia Pounds Brown, Alabama, Mounds to Missiles (1962) and Alabama Heritage (1968). 

Joseph Roberts, who wrote "Ever Been to Braden?" served in the U.S. military 1942-1943 and again 1951-1968. In that year he began teaching at Troy State, a post he held until 1981. In addition to writing at least two books on fish as pets, he published a novel, Web of Life in 1957 and a book of poems in 1980. I've found no indication he published any other short fiction.

Carolynne Scott was born in Birmingham in 1937. She worked at two of that city's newspapers and other publications. In 1979 her book Country Roads: A Journey Through Rustic Alabama appeared. Her collection of 15 short stories, The Green and the Burning Alike, was published in 1992. Her story in this collection, "Far Bella Figura" later appeared in the February 1982 issue of Short Story International. Auburn University has a small collection of her papers. You can read more about her at her author page on Amazon.

John Craig Stewart [1915-2003] was a Selma native. After service in World War II, he taught at the University of Alabama (1950-1964) and the University of South Alabama (1964-1983). In addition to "The Last Day" in this collection, he had previously published the story "Outlaw Dog" in the Saturday Evening Post issue of September 24, 1955. His introduction here notes more than ten published stories. He published three novels, The First Gate (1960), Muscogee Twilight (1965) and The Last to Know (1981). I've done a blog post on him here.

"The Pink Puppy" is Nell Brasher's story in the anthology. Brasher [1912-1992]  wrote a column "Page from a Diary" for the Birmingham Post-Herald 1966-1974. A collection of short stories, The Weaning and Other Stories appeared the year after her death. Some of her columns were collected in Angel Tracks in the Cabbage Patch (1972) and other books. 

Most of the published work by Marjorie Lees Linn [1930-1979] beyond the story "Please Listen, Aunt Viney" seems to have been poetry. A collection of poems, Threads from Silence, was published the year after her death. Linn had no formal schooling after eighth grade, and she married at sixteen. Her introduction here does note publication of short stories, poetry and articles in various publication. She wrote a 1964 essay about the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four young girls and injured 22 others. 

An acknowledgement page in the back notes that several stories in the anthology were previously published, such as Jesse Hill Ford's and John Craig Stewart's in the Atlantic Monthly and one by H.E. Francis in Transatlantic Review. See below for the entire listing. 













This inscription is to Andreas Papandreou who was apparently a graduate student under Emerson at the University of Alabama. I found his 1976 university ID card in the book.  



I was lucky enough to have an English class with Oxford Stroud at Auburn University in the early 1970's. He was quite a teacher and raconteur. 


























Thursday, August 9, 2018

My Son Amos Has a New Book Out!

In March 2014 I wrote a blog post entitled "Three Generations in One Library" that discussed our family's presence on the shelves of UAB's Sterne Library. Covers of books by dad and myself are below. I also included this passage:

"My son Amos IV finished his M.A. in creative writing at UAB in 2011, and a copy of his thesis, a collection of three short stories, is held at Sterne along with all theses and dissertations done at the university. The library's catalog record for "Nobody Knows How It Got This Good" can be found here. Maybe one day Sterne will be able to buy a more formally published version."

After more than a year of anticipation since manuscript acceptance, my son Amos' collection of short stories has finally been published by Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama. The blurb on the publisher's web site notes,

"Drawing heavily on the author's experiences growing up in Central Alabama, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good explores themes of racial injustice, class, the Civil Rights Movement, environmental catastrophe, imprisonment, suburbanization, and the perennial themes of love, life and loss. 

Through sixteen stories sharing common environments and characters – a used car salesman, a cook on death row, a lynching survivor, a U.S. Census enumerator – Nobody Knows How It Got This Good, the author’s first short story collection, attempts to come to terms with the modern South. Though set in the Deep South, these stories aspire with humor and pathos to address national dilemmas."


The stories are set in the Birmingham area, and follow these characters as they move their own personal damaged landscapes in a place as problematic as Alabama and the "Magic City". Serious and funny combine in unexpected ways in this collection.

The book is available from various independent bookstores and libraries around the country, and online from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million. The book has been reviewed by Kirkus Reviews and New Southern FugitivesThe Louisiana Book News blog has recently picked son Amos’ new collection of stories set in the #Birmingham #Alabama area for its list of “Exciting new releases by Louisiana authors”. 

Amos was interviewed about the book by Alina Stefanescu of the Alabama Writers Conclave. Deep South Magazine published a "cover reveal" back in February. The cover photo was taken by William Widmer and the cover design is by Paul Halupka. 

His fiction and poems have appeared in Arcadia, Birmingham Arts Journal, Clarion, Fieldstone Review, Folio, Grain Magazine, Gravel, The Hollins Critic, Interim, New Ohio Review, New Orleans Review, Off the Coast, Pale Horse Review, Roanoke Review, Salamander, Tacenda Literary Magazine, Union Station Magazine, Yes, Poetry and Zouch

After years living in Boston and Lafayette and Baton Rouge, he now lives and works in New Orleans. His author website can be found at www.amosjasperwright.com

Alabama has produced a number of short story authors, including Truman Capote and Mary Ward Brown. I'm proud to see Amos join such distinguished company!
















Thursday, September 22, 2016

Tom Roan's 1936 "Loot Island"

Although he wrote novels and other types of stories, Tom Roan is best known as the author of hundreds of stories published in the western pulp magazines from the late 1920's until the early 1950's. He's also one of those authors whose life is more unbelievable than most of his fiction.

Roan was born in Snead on Sand Mountain in December 1892. His poor family moved frequently as the men sought jobs. At one point the family lived in Cardiff near Birmingham where his father William worked in a coal mine. Roan left Alabama on a freight train when he was fifteen and headed west.

He ended up in San Francisco, but that was only one of many stops during the next two decades. He served in the U.S. Army from 1913 until 1917, much of the time in Hawaii. Around that period Roan fought for Pancho Villa in Mexico, and worked in a circus, as a private detective and a marshal in various western towns. He was said to have killed five bad men during those days.

Roan returned to Alabama in 1930 with his first wife Marjorie. Soon they were living in Collinsville in DeKalb County. The following year Roan shot Dr. William Preston Hicks several times during a drunken brawl at Roan's home. Three trials later, in 1933, he was finally acquitted. During his time in jail he requested a typewriter so he could keep writing stories. Dr. Hicks, born in 1889, was a 1913 graduate of the Birmingham Medical College.

Marjorie and their daughter left Alabama during the trials, and she divorced Roan. The daughter was later killed in a car wreck in California. Roan would marry again, but they had no children. He died on July 1, 1958, in Sea Bright, New Jersey. He is buried in Fair View Cemetery in Middletown, New Jersey. 

Two early novels are autobiographical portraits of Roan's young days in Alabama. Stormy Road was published in 1934 and set in Attalla where Tom spent part of his youth. Black Earth came out the following year and is set in the coal mines around Birmingham. 

The story under discussion here, "Loot Island," is a real potboiler and set in Alabama. Two federal agents, G-men McGee and Lumbard, have arrived on an island in Lonesome Swamp pounded by "sheets of Alabama rain." They are following Crash Finnegan and his gang of thieving murderers who have hidden out in the "Treacherous Alabama Swamplands." Their loot consists of jewelry and almost three hundred thousand dollars. Their speed boat is ready to take them away if they need to say "good-by Alabama, hello, South America or some other safe places...[if] Washington got too nosey."

The local prison warden is skeptical of the need to search for the gang. "When a prisoner gets away and gets into it [the swamp], we usually let him go. If he's too bad, we watch the rims of the swamp. It's the hell-hole of Alabama." Nevertheless, he loans the agents a trusted prisoner named Rip, "a fearless Negro serving life imprisonment for the murder of one of his kind" who had "the highest recommendation his big, fat-jowled warden could possibly give him." Rip brought along two hound dogs to help in the hunt.

During that first night Rip and the dogs are murdered, and the convoluted chases back and forth over the island begin. Things are complicated by the "Swamp Rabbits", families who live on the island and don't seem to have much to do but visit each other and make "the traditional corn whiskey of Alabama." One of these denizens is the lovely girl Ann Crow, who can shoot as well as the rest of them and who quickly develops a thing for Lumbard. The feeling is mutual, of course.

At first the Swamp Rabbits are as suspicious of the federal men as they are of the recently arrived crooks, but soon the two groups work together. Chases, gun battles, fires, journeys through underground passageways and I don't remember what else ensue. We do get some lectures on how these people ended up in the swamp--escaping "damned Yankee carpet-baggers an' their kind what come down outa Yankeeland to take over the state" of course.  

Naturally this tale has a happy ending The crooks are vanquished and there is hope for the young lovers to get together in the future. "I reckon I'm not your kind," lovely Ann Crow tells Lumbard. "You see, I've never been about much, but I'm thanking you for coming. You have done us a good turn. The Swamp Rabbits never forget. But--but come back if you really do feel like coming back, I--I reckon I'll be here sorter just a-waitin'."

Who could refuse that invitation??

You can find Roan's story here. It was originally published in the September 19, 1936, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly. The table of contents for the issue can be found below. Roan shared space with at least two other prolific authors, Norman A. Daniel and Judson P. Philips. That magazine's history is about as convoluted as Roan's plot in this story.