Nonfiction | Chapter 16

"I Dream it Every Night"

By Ed Tarkington

April 21, 2011

April 20, 2011 When Dean Faulkner Wells was thirteen, she attended the premier of Intruder in the Dust at the Lyric Theatre in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family. With the spotlight shining on William Faulkner, Wells came to a dawning understanding of her uncle’s role in literature—and in the world. Now the author of a new memoir, Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi, she talks with Chapter 16 about William Faulkner’s literary legacy, how her extended family wrestled with the Civil Rights movement, and why Cormac McCarthy should win the Nobel Prize. Wells will present a slide show and discuss Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi at Burke’s Book Store in Memphis on April 21 at 5 p.m.

The Freedom They Fight For

By Susannah Felts

April 20, 2011

April 20, 2011 Part revivalist genre, part American-music-melting-pot, Americana music is “born of considerable artistic freedom—though, when a major record label is involved,” writes Nashville music journalist Jewly Hight, “the freedom may have to be fought for.” In Right By Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs, Hight considers eight remarkable female singer-songwriters: Lucinda Williams, Julie Miller, Victoria Williams, Michelle Shocked, Mary Gauthier, Ruthie Foster, Elizabeth Cook, and Abigail Washburn. These women have all fought that good fight, but what they share most is their unconventionality and a gutsy dedication to their own evolving visions, often at the expense of broader fame or commercial success. Hight will discuss and sign Right By Her Roots on April 23, 11 a.m., at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. During the event, she will also interview Americana musician Sarah Siskind, prior to Siskind’s own performance. The cost of this event is included with museum admission and is free to museum members.

The Novelist as Historian

By Chris Scott

April 14, 2011

April 14, 2011 Shelby Foote took twenty years to write his magnum opus, The Civil War: A Narrative, gaining worldwide fame for the accomplishment only when Ken Burns featured him in the blockbuster PBS documentary The Civil War. To reintroduce Foote and his three-volume history of war at the beginning of the war’s sesquicentennial, Jon Meacham has edited a collection of essays called American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic The Civil War: A Narrative. The compilation explains how a good Southern novelist became a great historian and taught Americans to love their country’s past—even when that past wasn’t perfect.

Gardening with George (and John, and Thomas, and James)

By Chris Scott

April 14, 2011

April 14, 2011 In Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, writer and gardening historian Andrea Wulf makes a bold claim—that understanding America’s creation requires knowing the founding fathers as gardeners. While historians may debate her thesis, it is certain that Wulf has wonderfully illuminated an often overlooked and very important aspect of the founders’ lives, providing new reasons to be inspired by them. As part of the Salon@615 series, she will discuss and sign Founding Gardeners in the courtyard of the Nashville Public Library at noon on April 20.

American Homer

By Clay Risen

April 13, 2011

April 13, 2011 Like his putative Greek forerunner, Shelby Foote was not a trained historian but a master storyteller. He wrote four well-received novels before embarking on The Civil War, including Shiloh, a fictional account of the 1862 battle. Long after completing his trilogy of history books, he continued to think of himself first and foremost as a fiction writer: “I think of myself as a novelist who wrote a three-volume history of the Civil War. I don’t think it’s a novel, but I think it’s certainly by a novelist,” he said.

Entirely His Own Man

By Hampton Sides

April 11, 2011

April 11, 2011 Shelby Foote was the first writer I ever met, and the only writer I ever personally knew until I left my hometown of Memphis and went off to college. And so my image of what a writer was supposed to look like, sound like, and smell like, came first and foremost from him. I vaguely sensed even as a high-school teenager that I wanted to be a writer, but watching him, studying him, I couldn’t see how I could get there. I couldn’t see myself wielding a quill pen. My Southern accent was strong enough, but lacked Shelby’s beautiful custardy lilts and Delta diphthongs. And I knew I could never pull off a masterpiece of a beard like his.