Photographing Southern Writers: An Unlikely Journey to the Soul of Southern Literature

Forty-six years ago, I decided on - or perhaps fell into - the idea of photographing three generations of the South's most celebrated writers. It was an idea born out of a fall 1979 conversation with my friend William Price Fox (Bill Fox) at a local Columbia bar as we discussed my literary prospects which were, in Bill's opinion, not all that great. "You know what," Fox told me, reflecting on the entirety of the miserable fiction I had written for his creative writing classes over the last eighteen months, "you're a much better photographer than you are a writer. You should do that instead." I took him at his word. A few weeks later I photographed Fox after he dismissed our class, and, as the cliché goes, the rest is history. It was a decision that took me on a magical and wholly unexpected nearly six-year journey into the homes and lives of some of my literary heroes: Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Anne Tyler, William Styron, Tennessee Williams, Cormac McCarthy, and dozens of others. Some (Walker and Cormac, in particular) I visited and corresponded with regularly for years. We were friends. This book is the story of this unlikely photographic journey into the heart of Southern literature, told through a selection of the Southern writers I photographed between 1979 and 1984 and originally published by the University of Georgia Press in 1985 as Images of the Southern Writer. This book also includes a selection of the many other writers I met along the way - Tom Wolfe, Joseph Heller, Tom Stoppard, Richard Hugo, Seamus Heaney, George Plimpton, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Garrison Keillor, Tim O'Brien, and others. It is a story fueled by extreme naivete, inexperience, and youthful enthusiasm. Nevertheless, there is a profound yet deceptively simple lesson to be found here, and it is this. Clarity about the rightness of our life decisions only comes with the passage of time. Or as Apple founder Steve Jobs put it in 2005 when addressing the Stanford University graduating class "You can't connect the dots" about the decisions we make in our lives when "looking forward." It is only when we look "backward" in the rearview mirror that it all makes sense. Or perhaps, even more simply put-never doubt the advice and guidance that pure serendipity offers. It is hardly ever wrong.