A critic for New York magazine complained in mock frustration that Unbroken “seems designed to wrench from self-respecting critics all the blurby adjectives we normally try to avoid: It is amazing, unforgettable, gripping, harrowing, chilling, and inspiring.” And Rebecca Skloot, herself a superb popular historian, called Hillenbrand simply “one of our best writers.”
And so it is clear that for those of us who love a good book, the end of great writing is not in sight. We may, of course, have our different definitions of greatness, and those that I have confessed in these pages are deeply personal and purely my own. Not everyone is drawn to a book about war, not everyone will share my love of Southern writers or American journalists such as David Halberstam. And where are the authors from other lands? Where are Homer, Chaucer, Hemingway, or Proust? These are questions for which I have no answer. Only this: whatever the books that have touched our hearts—whether through joy, discomfort, inspiration or escape—those are the encounters that are worth celebrating, and preferences none of us need to defend.
Notes and Acknowledgments
Even though these pages are highly personal, reflecting my ruminations on the books that have mattered most in my life, I must also acknowledge a debt to other writers and friends who have helped to make this book what it is. In every chapter, there are quotes from the featured books—quotes acknowledged in the narrative itself, which are designed to convey the power and the beauty of these works. For the most part these quotes are self-explanatory.
In addition, in putting together the back-stories and reflecting critically on these books, I’ve relied on the insights of other authors. Here, chapter by chapter, are grateful acknowledgements of those debts.
Chapter 1—Two authors in particular helped shape my understanding of the writing of Huckleberry Finn. Robert G. O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University, provided an essay entitled “Blues for Huckleberry” as introduction to a 2003 Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It was O’Meally who called my attention to the reflections of Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison on the characters of Huck and Jim. O’Meally also quotes the oft-cited observation by Ernest Hemingway that “all American writing” comes from Huckleberry Finn. For a broader view of Mark Twain’s life and the accumulation of experiences that shaped the writing of Twain’s masterpiece, I relied on Ron Powers’s biography, Mark Twain: A Life. And finally, I relied on the Roy Blount Jr. essay, “Mark Twain: Our Original Superstar,” published in the July 3, 2008, issue of Time.
Chapter 2—For the background story of To Kill a Mockingbird, I am indebted to Charles J. Shields’s biography of Harper Lee, Mockingbird. The stories of Tom Robertson and Walter Lett, two real-life victims of racial injustice who bear a resemblance to the fictional Tom Robinson, are both contained in Mockingbird. For the story of the Scottsboro Boys, perhaps the most famous example of injustice in the 1930s, I relied on Dan T. Carter’s book, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South; Douglas O. Linder’s essay, “The Trials of ‘The Scottsboro Boys’”; and the PBS documentary, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, directed by Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman.
Richard Wright’s review of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter appeared in the New Republic in August 1940. The story of Lillian Smith’s role in the arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which indirectly influenced the presidential election of 1960, is told in Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63.
Chapter 3—Henry Louis Gates’s phrase “incandescent with racial rage” appears in the book, Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation, edited by Barbara A. Baker. Gates’s appraisals of Murray appear in that same volume. Biographical information on Richard Wright is based primarily on Wright’s Black Boy. Historian Joel Williamson’s quote about lynching comes from his book, A Rage for Order.
The story of James Baldwin’s early life comes from Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. In my 2008 book, With Music and Justice for All, I tell the story of Baldwin’s encounter with school desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina. Baldwin tells that story himself in “The Hard Kind of Courage,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1958. Albert Murray’s quote, “Boy, don’t come telling me nothing about no old white folks,” comes from Murray’s “Stonewall Jackson’s Waterloo,” published in Harper’s, February 1969. So does his quote about “grown folks talking.”
Chapter 4—Larry L. King’s profile of comedian Dave Gardner, “Whatever Happened to Brother Dave?,” appeared in Harper’s in September 1970. Part of King’s story about his writing of “The Old Man” was related to me during a chance encounter with him in Washington, D.C., early in the 1970s. More formally, King told the story in The Old Man and Lesser Mortals. King’s assessments of Willie Morris and David Halberstam are contained in his book, In Search of Willie Morris. Morris’s account of his first meeting with Senator Robert Kennedy is contained in the memoir, New York Days. Tom Wolfe’s description of Jimmy Breslin comes from Wolfe’s The New Journalism. Robert Kennedy’s remarkable speech after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered extemporaneously, is quoted in the book, RFK: Collected Speeches, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and C. Richard Allen.
Chapter 5—Jacobo Timerman’s description of the Ukranian village in which he was born is contained in his book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. His powerful quotes about President Jimmy Carter and the “violent and criminal” twentieth century were offered in a 1985 interview with me and appear in my book, Prophet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy. The story of Anne Frank and her family is taken substantially, of course, from Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. But I also relied on Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped Hide the Frank Family, by Miep Gies and Alison Leslie Gold. Eleanor Roosevelt’s quote about Anne Frank comes from Roosevelt’s introduction to the 1993 Bantam Books edition of Frank’s diary. Kurt Vonnegut’s wartime letter written to his family on May 29, 1945, appears in his Armageddon in Retrospect. So does his original description of the bombing of Dresden. Marshall Frady’s quote from an Egyptian editor about the dangers of America’s role in the world appears in Frady’s Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness.
Chapter 6—President Woodrow Wilson’s description of The Birth of a Nation—“like writing history with lightning”—appears in Joel Williamson’s A Rage for Order. The story of Martin Luther King Sr.’s appearance at the 1976 Democratic National Convention comes from my own Prophet from Plains. On a couple of occasions, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Clyde Edgerton at some length about his writing, and those interviews, in addition to his novel Walking Across Egypt, form the backdrop of the Edgerton section in this chapter. In the course of many conversations, my friend Dori Sanders has recounted the writing of her blockbuster, Clover.
Chapter 7—Paul Kingsbury’s “Pride and Prejudice,” which appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of Vanderbilt Magazine, offers excellent insight into the Fugitive poets and the agrarians who wrote I’ll Take My Stand. My synopsis here of the story of Huey Long is based primarily on three sources: T. Harry Williams’s biography, Huey Long; Alan Brinkley’s Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression; and Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, Huey Long. The quote about Long from President Roosevelt’s mother, “Who is that awful man?,” is taken from Brinkley’s Voices of Protest. Arthur Schlesinger’s disparaging quote about Long comes from an on-camera interview in Burns’s documentary.
Chapter 8—Merle Haggard’s lyrics about migrant workers in California are from the song, “Hungry Eyes.” John Steinbeck’s journalistic essays have been reprinted in the book, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, with an insightful introduction by Charles Wollenberg. Dorothea Lange’s quotes about her iconic photograph, “The Migrant Mother,” are taken from her field notes. I benefited enormously from Robert DeMott’s introduction to the Penguin edition of The Grapes of Wrath.
DeMott, in turn, relied on Steinbeck’s diary, Working Days, where Steinbeck’s quotes and doubts about his novel were recorded. Critics’ quotes about The Grapes of Wrath—both positive and negative—come from DeMott’s introduction. Wayne Flynt’s observations about The Grapes of Wrath were offered in an email exchange with me. Flynt’s quotes about the treatment of poor whites in American literature comes from his excellent history, Poor But Proud. Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics are taken from the song, “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”
Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee has helped to inspire a whole generation of books sympathetic to the story of American Indians. Two of my favorites are John Ehle’s novelized history of the Cherokees, Trail of Tears, and Josephine Humphreys’s haunting novel, Nowhere Else on Earth.
Chapter 9—Alex Haley tells the backstory of Roots in the final chapters of that book. C. Eric Lincoln’s story of being attacked as a teenager appears in my book, With Music and Justice for All, and originally appeared in a 1988 profile of Lincoln that I wrote for the Charlotte Observer. The same profile included Alex Haley’s assessment of Lincoln’s fine novel, The Avenue, Clayton City. Rick Bragg’s assessment of Roots was taken from an interview with me. Pat Conroy’s beautiful essay, “The Death of Santini,” was reprinted in the book, Novello: Ten Years of Great American Writing, published in 2000 by Novello Festival Press.
Chapter 10—Sena Jeter Naslund shared the stories behind her novels in a lengthy 2012 interview with me. An excellent profile of Naslund also appears in Roy Hoffman’s Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations. John Updike’s observations on Hester Prynne, protagonist of The Scarlet Letter, are taken from the National Public Radio essay, “Hester Prynne: Sinner, Victim, Object, Winner,” by Andrea Seabrook. Accounts of the Birmingham church bombing and the discovery of the patent leather shoe appear in Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home and in my own Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America. Geraldine Brooks’s quotes about her protagonist Anna Frith, and about the human heart, are taken from an interview with Brooks included in the Penguin edition of Year of Wonders. Maureen Morehead’s poem, cited by Sena Jeter Naslund, appears in the book, In a Yellow Room. Morehead is poet laureate of Kentucky.
Epilogue—In this epilogue of writers who continue to inspire me, I wanted to work in my fellow Alabamians, Tom Franklin, Michael Knight, Vicki Covington, Nanci Kincaid, Roy Hoffman, Cassandra King, and Mark Childress; South Carolinians Ashley Warlick and George Singleton; and North Carolinians Jerry Bledsoe and Hal Crowther. They are now, as they should be, officially included.
And finally for reading all or parts of this manuscript and offering valuable feedback, special thanks to my wife, Nancy Gaillard, and friends Jay Lamar, Tom Lawrence, Patti Meredith, Kathryn Scheldt, and Tom Peacock. Thanks also to Jacquelyn Hall, Steve Trout, Ellen Holliday, Tom Pinckney, Jennifer Lindsay, Becky McLaughlin, Mara Kozelsky, and Carol Sherrod.
Literary Index
A
Abundance 174–176
Adam & Eve 165, 179, 181–182
Admiral Robert Penn Warren and the Snows of Winter 184–185
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn xiii, 3, 10–15, 18–20, 167, 193
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The 11
Aeschylus 72
Agee, James 21, 23, 99
Ahab’s Wife 165, 166, 168, 169–170, 171, 179
Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations 197
Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation 194
Alcott, Louisa May 166, 176
All Creatures Great and Small 94–97
Allen, C. Richard 195
Allman Brothers 102
All Over but the Shoutin’ 157
All the King's Men xiii, 111–112, 114, 118–120, 121, 126, 185
Ancient Law, The 106
Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped Hide the Frank Family 195
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl 76, 82–83, 84–85, 195
Armageddon in Retrospect 195
Armies of the Night, The 65
At Play in the Fields of the Lord 111, 122, 124–125
Autobiography of Malcolm X, The 149–150
Ava’s Man 147, 155, 158–159
Avenue, Clayton City, The 153, 197
Awakening, The 107
B
Baldwin, James 40, 46–47, 48–51, 51, 57, 122, 194
Balzac, Honoré de 43
Bayou Folk 107
Beach Music 162
Benchley, Peter 165, 171
Best and the Brightest, The xiii, 68, 74
“Big Boy Leaves Home” 44
Big Russ and Me 159
Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness 196
Birth of a Nation, The 98, 196
Black Boy 41–44, 194
“Black Pneumonia” 130
Bledsoe, Jerry 198
Blount, Roy, Jr. 3, 16, 194
“Blues for Huckleberry” 193
Book of Genesis 182
Book of Prefaces, A 43
Boone 186
Bragg, Rick 37, 147, 155, 156–159, 197
Branch, Taylor 194
Breslin, Jimmy 58, 65, 195
“Briar Patch, The" 114
“Bright and Morning Star” 44–45
Brinkley, Alan 196
Brokaw, Tom 85, 191
Brokeback Mountain 184, 189–190
Brontë, Charlotte 166
Brooks, Cleanth 120
Brooks, Geraldine 165, 176–179, 198
Brother to a Dragonfly 121
Brown, Dee 129, 142–145, 197
Brown, Larry 107
Buckdancer’s Choice 100
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee 129, 141–145, 197
C
Caldwell, Erskine vii
Campbell, Will 120–121
Camus, Albert xii, 46
Capote, Truman 29, 66
Carry Me Home 172, 198
Carter, Dan T. 194
Carver, George Washington 53
Catch-22 86
Chase, Owen 169
Chaucer, Geoffrey 191
Childhood, A: The Biography of a Place 156
Childress, Mark 198
Chopin, Kate 94, 106
Clansman, The 98
Cleaver, Eldridge 40
Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark
Clover 94, 108–109, 109, 196
Cold Mountain 186
Color Purple, The 109
Confessions of Nat Turner, The 52, 65
Conroy, Pat 37, 147, 157, 160–164, 197
Covington, Dennis 184, 186–188
Covington, Vicki 198
Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America 198
Crane, Stephen 43
Crews, Harry 147, 156
Crowther, Hal 198
Cured by Fire 156
Curtain of Green, A 21, 32–33, 103
Custer Died for Your Sins 145
D
Davidson, Donald 112
Dead Sea Scrolls 181
“Death of Santini, The” 163–164, 197
Defoe, Daniel 13
Deliverance 99, 100
Deloria, Vine, Jr. 129, 145
DeMott, Robert 136, 196
Descendant, The 106
“Desiree’s Baby” 107
Dickens, Charles xi, 166, 175
Dickey, James 94, 99–100
Dillard, Annie 107
Dirty Work 107
Dixon, Thomas 98
Dostoevsky, Fyodor xiii, 43
Douglass, Frederick 52
DuBois, W.E.B. 52
E
Edgerton, Clyde 94, 102–106, 108, 110, 196
Edwards, Harry Stillwell 10
Ehle, John 197
Eliot, T.S. 43, 55, 112
Ellen Foster 107
Ellison, Ralph 3, 14–15, 15, 40, 53, 57, 193
Eneas Africanus 10, 14
Evans, Walker 23
F
Factories in the Field 138–139
Fair and Tender Ladies 107
Farewell to Arms, A 102
Father Coughlin and the Great Depression 196
Faulkner, William vii, xii, 31, 40, 54–55, 55, 60, 64, 112, 121, 160
Fire Next Time, The 40, 50
Flynt, Wayne 23, 138, 197
Foote, Shelby 56
Forbes, Esther 3, 5–8, 9, 20
Ford, John 139, 141
Forrest Gump 159
Four Spirits 171, 174
Frady, Marshall 65, 76, 93, 195
Frank, Anne 76, 81, 82–85, 195
Franklin, Tom 198
Frazier, Charles 184, 186
G
Gap Creek 186
Gates, Henry Louis 40, 54, 194
“Ghost of Tom Joad, The” 141, 197
Gibbons, Kaye 107
Gies, Miep 76, 84, 195
Giovanni, Nikki 40
Gipson, Fred 10, 96
Glasgow, Ellen 94, 106
Gold, Alison Leslie 195
Gone With the Wind 98
Grapes of Wrath, The xiii, 129, 131, 134, 136–138, 139–141, 141, 197
Greatest Generation, The 85
Great Santini, The 147, 160, 161–162
Grey, Zane 10
Grisham, John 184, 185
Groom, Winston 147, 159
Guterson, David 111, 122, 125–128
Guthman, Edwin O. 195
Guthrie, Woody 129–130, 134, 140, 141
H
Haggard, Merle 129, 131, 196
Halberstam, David xiii, 58, 65, 68–72, 74, 75, 191, 195
Haley, Alex 147, 148–153, 154–155, 155, 197
The Books That Mattered Page 19
