In this episode of “Keen On”, Andrew is joined by W. Ralph Eubanks, the author of “A Place Like Mississippi”, to discuss how the South has produced some of America’s most celebrated authors, and no state more so than Mississippi
W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi, which will be released on March 16, 2021 by Timber Press. A Place Like Mississippi takes readers on a complete tour of the real and imagined landscapes that have inspired generations of authors. This is a book that honors and explores the landscape of Mississippi—and the Magnolia State’s history—and reveals the many ways this landscape has informed the work of some of America’s most treasured authors.
Eubanks is the author of two other books: Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi's Dark Past (Basic Books) and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South (HarperCollins). Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley named Ever is a Long Time as one of the best nonfiction books of 2003. Richard Ford wrote that The House at the End of the Road “finds its truth in between conventional wisdom and sociological presumption, in between lies and faulty history. It is a story of race, of family, of place itself, and it tells us that compassion and the stirring force of individual human endeavor finally mean more than anything.”
Eubanks has contributed articles to the Washington Post Outlook and Style sections, WIRED, The Hedgehog Review,The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and National Public Radio. A graduate of the University of Mississippi (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (M.A., English Language and Literature), he is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation. Ralph lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and three children. From 1995 to 2013 he was director of publishing for the Library of Congress and is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia. Currently he is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
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W. Ralph Eubanks on a Journey Through the Literary History of Mississippi