Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey

by Marshall Frady

A Journalist's Odyssey [paperback] Frady, Marshall [Sep 01, 1981]

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Essays

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

A native of South Carolina, Marshall Frady was a journalist for more than twenty-five years, writing for Newsweek, Life, Harper's, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, The Sunday Times of London, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He was a correspondent on Nightline; chief writer and host of ABC News' Closeup, for which he won two Emmys and the duPont-Columbia Award; and the author of six books.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frady has written about history, a history I lived through in part: Lester Maddox running for governor of Georgia; Wilbur Mills' downfall; N.C. Senator Sam Ervin's moment in the spotlight as chair of the Watergate impeachment committee; Jimmy Carter's unlikely rise to the Presidency; Will Campbell's Jesus-like ministry among "rednecks" and KKK'ers. (I read Campbell's book Brother to a Dragonfly years ago.) Frady also writes about the strange story of author Jesse Hill Ford, and a rigged trial in Lowndes County, Alabama; about a private detective who pronounces eloquently on the state of the new South and the moral failings of people who hire him. Frady grew up in the South, son of a Baptist minister, and though he went off to become a journalist and writer, emotionally he remained a Southerner, and he understands the culture in all its contradictions and complexities. This is a beautifully written book, capturing individuals, communities, a region, and a time period. I would recommend this book to anyone who has lived in the South; anyone who is interested in the racial history of this country; anyone who appreciates literary journalism. I can't wait to find time to read Frady's biographies of George Wallace and Billy Graham.

[Dave Gunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marshall Frady is the unrecognized genius of 1960s southern journalism. I got turned on to him by Norman Mailer (not personally) who said Frady's WALLACE was one of the better books he'd read. So after reading that wonder on a plane trip to Hawaii, I started to clean out Frady's closet, primarily his books on Billy Graham and Jesse Jackson. It wasn't until I moved to Chicago that I was able to find a copy of SOUTHERNERS at the library.

Frady is at his best when he finds a quirk in a person and rides on it for pages, letting the subject define himself though his conversation, viewpoints, and standards, a trick he used in WALLACE (which is a half-imagined, half-truth narrative on Governor George Wallace), and in the shorter pieces in SOUTHERNERS.

One of the finest passages in SOUTHERNERS is the piece Frady wrote on Jesse Hill Ford, who wrote LIBERATION OF LORD BYRON JONES, in which a racial murder in the novel mirrors a murder that Ford himself commits a few years after publication. As the verdict is read in the court hearing, the concept of truth being stranger than fiction holds forth.

While many of the characters in SOUTHERNERS are despicable, Frady finds a way through his writing to redeem their evil and misunderstandings of human nature.

Plus, it inspired my first ever trip to the south! Can't wait to go back.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic - I'm sure I will recommend this relentlessly for a long time

[Patrick]

Recently acquired at the Friends of the Library bookstore at the La Palma, CA public library. Written by an author who covered the civil rights movement as a journalist for various magazines, and who recently wrote a nice short biography of Martin Luther King as part of the Penguin Lives series.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book almost made me feel not that bad about not letting the south secede.