Larry Brown (16 July 1937 - 2 July 2020)

2 July 2020

“Culture Springs from the Actions of People in a Landscape”: Poor Whites and Environmentalism

This chapter examines the varying strains of environmentalism and/or activism that run throughout the work of southern writers including Janisse Ray, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Mary Hood, Ann Pancake, Silas House, and Denise Giardina. It explores the relationship between environmentalism and poverty as it discusses waste, throw-away culture, recycling and sustainability. It argues for a move from regionalism/nationalism to localism/globalism and questions the false dichotomy between the Global North and Global South. The chapter turns to Appalachia to consider the impact of Mountaintop removal mining (MTR), and it interrogates both the economics that often drive the poor to undertake environmentally destructive jobs and the activism that exists within poor communities.

A Country for Old Men: The South of Clyde Edgerton’s Early Novels

This chapter discusses Clyde Edgerton's early novels, whose characters define themselves and the essential nature of contemporary life in the South. If we accept Erik Bledsoe's description of the Rough South as “a world of excess—excessive alcohol, excessive sex, excessive violence,” the works of Edgerton hardly seem to qualify. Indeed, Yvonne Mason, in Reading, Learning, Teaching Clyde Edgerton, declares his work “infinitely suitable” for “young readers in the English Language Arts classroom”—an appraisal difficult to imagine for the fiction of Harry Crews or Larry Brown. Edgerton's first three novels—Raney (1985), Walking Across Egypt (1987), and The Floatplane Notebooks (1988)—offer a way to understand his South, a world that increasingly belongs to and is defined by aging and death. This chapter considers Edgerton's other works, including the novel The Night Train (2011), the memoir Solo: My Adventure in the Air (2005), and the nonfiction Papadaddy's Book for New Fathers: Advice to Dads of All Ages (2013).

Larry Brown: A Firefighter Finds His Voice

This chapter discusses the life and work of Larry Brown. Born in 1951, Brown grew up in rural Lafayette County, Mississippi, the land on which William Faulkner based his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. His father, a World War II veteran haunted by memories of combat, worked as a sharecropper, the original occupation shared by Faulkner's Snopes family, notorious for burning barns and other “white trash” transgressions. When Brown was three, his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. The family returned to Mississippi when Brown was in his early teens, and his father died a few years later. Working-class characters stand at the center of Brown's fiction, and in works dating from the beginning of his career, they frequently speak in the first-person. This is evident in his first collection, Facing the Music (1988), and in his first novel, Dirty Work (1989). Brown's other works include Joe (1991), Father and Son (1996), Fay (2000), The Rabbit Factory (2003), and the posthumously published A Miracle of Catfish (2007).

“Rough South”: Beginnings

This chapter discusses the beginnings of the Rough South designation. The chapter's author reflects on meeting Larry Brown, a largely self-educated writer who was born into a working-class family and remained a member of the working class. He also recounts the series of one-hour shows that he pitched to Wyndham Robertson at UNC-TV in the late 1980s, which he called “The Rough South of (name your author).” He said he dropped the fiction element for the first two episodes, on Timothy Reese McLaurin and Harry Crews. The author proceeds to explain how he met Crews, whom he interviewed for The Rough South show. In that interview, Crews expressed his views on topics such as writing, violence, and sports. The author concludes by talking about the principal photography that he made for The Rough South of Larry Brown.