Bible Belt Blues

Like most progressive Southerners, Hal Crowther is decidedly angry about current social and political events, but few writers are more able than he to articulate the problems, the issues, and even the bitter humor of our present situation.
Hal Crowther is a writer who has made a long and illustrious career with sharp political and social commentary in the pages of national and regional outlets, from Time to the Atlanta Constitution to the Oxford American. In this collection, Crowther turns his attention once again to the Bible Belt, the American South, where he finds plenty of fodder for the blues: the descent from George Washington to Donald Trump, the difficulty of finding civil political discourse in a world where folks spew vitriol from behind their keyboards, Klan members marching down the street in Crowther’s hometown, the infantilization of culture (starring Mark Zuckerberg), the continued intertwining of religion and governance, and more. This essay collection features a foreword by eminent Southern writer Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls and Silver Alert.

Hal Crowther is an award-winning critic and essayist, a journalist whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, Granta, and Narrative magazines, among many others, and in the Oxford American, where his column “Dealer’s Choice” was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. His columns and reviews have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Spectator, and many independent weeklies and journals. A recipient of the Baltimore Sun’s Mencken Award for Writing, he is the author of four essay collections and An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken. His most recent collection was Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers (Blair, 2018). For his third collection of essays, Gather at the River, he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism. He lives in Hillsborough, NC, with his wife, novelist Lee Smith.