Southern Writers

Joseph M. Flora is Atlanta Professor of Southern Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of many books, including The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs and the original Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary.Amber Vogel is director of the DESTINY Traveling Science Learning Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A Californian by birth, she has lived in the South since a teenager and has been engaged in the region's culture and literature as an editor and educator for more than twenty years.Bryan Giemza is a visiting assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University.

Biographical sketches of 378 writers associated with the American South are included in this important new reference work. Compiled by 172 scholars, these summaries--many of which are not readily available elsewhere--provide in their total effect a brief history of southern literature from colonial times to the present.The volume is, in part, a companion to A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed.), a work that has become a standard reference for anyone seriously interested in the literature of the South. With its wealth of essential biographical information on the region's writers, both major and minor, this new guide will take its place alongside that earlier volume as an invaluable aid to the study of southern writing. Especially useful will be complete listings of the first printings of the books by each writer provided after the respective summaries.Included as contributors of the individual biographical summaries are most of the better-known scholars of southern literature, plus a number of promising young scholars. The editors, each of whom is an outstanding scholar in southern literary studies, are: