Robert L. Phillips, Jr., joined the English department at Mississippi State University in 1971 and became book review editor of the Mississippi Quarterly in 1973. As codirector for the Mississippi Library Commission’s project “Mississippi Writers in Context,” a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (1975–1977), Phillips designed and coedited a six-segment television series on Mississippi’s authors, A Climate for Genius (1975); edited written transcripts of the series; compiled and edited a collection of antebellum Mississippi short stories; and wrote introductory booklets on the works of Shelby Foote and Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples.
