Alex Haley was an American writer and the author of the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The book and the television miniseries raised the public awareness of black American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history. Haley’s first book was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965, a collaboration through numerous lengthy interviews with Malcolm X. He was working on a second family history novel at his death. Haley had requested that David Stevens, a screenwriter, complete it; the book was published as Queen: The Story of an American Family. It was adapted as a miniseries, Alex Haley’s Queen, broadcast in 1993.
Cormac McCarthy was raised primarily in Tennessee. In 1951, he began attending the University of Tennessee. McCarthy first experienced widespread success with All the Pretty Horses (1992), for which he received both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His 2006 novel The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.
The Fugitive Poets (Agrarians) were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who united to write a pro–Southern agrarian manifesto, published as the essay collection I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). The Southern Agrarians greatly contributed to the Southern Renaissance, the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s, and were based at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King’s Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. Robert Penn Warren graduated from Clarksville High School in Clarksville, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University in 1925; and the University of California, Berkeley (M.A.) in 1926. Warren’s best-known work is All the King’s Men, a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Warren served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1944–1945 (later termed Poet Laureate), and won two Pulitzer Prizes in poetry, in 1958 for Promises: Poems 1954–1956 and in 1979 for Now and Then. Promises also won the annual National Book Award for Poetry.
In the 1950’s Warren adopted a high profile as a supporter of racial integration. In 1965, he published Who Speaks for the Negro?, a collection of interviews with black civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, thus further distinguishing his political leanings from the more conservative philosophies associated with fellow Agrarians.
Warren’s All the King’s Men became a highly successful film, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1949. There was another film adaptation in 2006 by writer/director Steven Zaillian featured Sean Penn as Willie Stark and Jude Law as Jack Burden.
In 1965, Random House published Robert Penn Warren’s book titled Who Speaks for the Negro? In preparation for writing the volume, Warren traveled throughout the United States in early 1964 and spoke with large numbers of men and women who were involved in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. He interviewed nationally-known figures as well as people working in the trenches of the movement whose names might otherwise be lost to history. The published volume contains sections of transcripts from these conversations as well as Warren’s reflections on the individuals he interviewed and his thoughts on the state of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
Warren states in the forward to the volume: “I have written this book because I wanted to find out something, first hand, about the people, some of them anyway, who are making the Negro Revolution what it is—one of the dramatic events of the American Story. This book is not a history, a sociological analysis, an anthropological study, or a Who’s Who of the Negro Revolution. It is a record of my attempt to find out what I could find out. It is primarily a transcript of conversation, with settings and commentaries.”
“Nikki” Giovanni, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world’s most well-known African-American poets,her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children’s literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has been named as one of Oprah Winfrey’s 25 “Living Legends”.
James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. When Agee was six, his father was killed in an automobile accident. In 1957, his novel A Death in the Family (based on the events surrounding his father’s death) was published posthumously and in 1958 won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Dale Maharidge is an American author, journalist and academic best known for his collaborations with photographer Michael Williamson.
Maharidge and Williamson’s book And Their Children After Them won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1990. It was conceived as a revisiting of the places and people depicted in Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has grown to be considered Agee’s masterpiece. In the summer of 1936, during the Great Depression, Agee spent eight weeks on assignment for Fortune with photographer Walker Evans, living among sharecroppers. While Fortune did not publish his article, Agee turned the material into a book titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Ignored on its original publication in 1941, the book has since been placed among the greatest literary works of the 20th century by the New York School of Journalism and the New York Public Library.
Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Madison Smartt Bell is a graduate of Montgomery Bell Academy. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award.
Madison Smartt Bell’s Doctor Sleep (novel) was adapted for film as Close Your Eyes (2002), now also known as Doctor Sleep.
Madison Jones was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 21, 1925. He was the son of a Presbyterian businessman, and spent his early years living in suburban Nashville. When Jones was 14, his father purchased Sycamore Farm in hill country 25 miles north of the city. At 17, Jones dropped out of Vanderbilt University to become a farmer, moving to Sycamore Farm where he lived for a year and a half. He became associated with the Southern Agrarians, which proved a great influence on his later work. He received The Sewanee Review Fellowship for 1955/56, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1968, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. The historical novel Nashville 1864, set during the American Civil War, received the inaugural Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction in 1998.
In a 1987 article, Southern Magazine called Madison Jones’s A Cry of Absence “the last pure tragedy written by a Southerner.” Set in 1957 in a small Tennessee town just awakening to shifting racial and social attitudes, the novel concerns the inevitability of change and the consequences for those who resist it. Hester Cameron Glenn, a proud, well-bred southern aristocrat, is the self-appointed guardian of her family’s and her community’s heritage. When a young black man is chained to a tree and stoned to death, Hester deplores the brutality of the act. Slowly she comes to suspect, and finally to know, who the real murderer is, and she decides what she must do to protect the family honor.
Will Davis Campbell was a Baptist minister, activist, author, and lecturer. Throughout his life, he was a notable Southern white supporter of African-American civil rights. In addition to his activism, Campbell was also a noted author, particularly with his autobiographical work Brother to a Dragonfly, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1978. He attended Louisiana College, then enlisted in the Army during World War II. He served as a medic. After the war, he attended Wake Forest College (BA, English), Tulane University, and Yale Divinity School.
In 1957, while working for the National Council of Churches, Campbell participated in two notable events of the Civil Rights Movement; he was one of four people who escorted the black students who integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools; and he was the only white person present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by Martin Luther King Jr. In 1961, he helped “Freedom Riders” of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to integrate interstate bus travel, despite white mob violence, in Alabama.In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Campbell discussed many of the issues of the Civil Rights Movement, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, desegregation busing, and the relationship between theology and social activism.
