Wade Mainer (b. 1907) is believed to be the longest-lived country entertainer ever. His banjo lessons began in childhood and he played informally into his adult years, when he joined his brother, fiddler ...

In his prime, Vanity Fair nominated James Branch Cabell for "Immortality" on its pages reserved for acclaiming the most select of notable achievers. Favored by the intelligentsia, Cabell was the author ...

The lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called “the batture.” On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity ...

The first Latin American actor to become a superstar, Ramon Novarro was for years one of Hollywood's top actors. Born Ramon Samaniego to a prominent Mexican family, he arrived in America in 1916, a refugee ...

Almost a century ago, Annette McConnell Anderson, a New Orleans society woman, vowed that her three sons would become artists. Turning her back on bourgeois life and abetted by her skeptical husband—a ...

In 1963, the streams of religious revival, racial strife, and cold-war politics were feeding the swelling river of social unrest in America. Marshaling massive forces, civil rights leaders were primed ...

While best known as the creator of Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000) was also a thoughtful and precise prose writer who knew how to explain his craft in clear and engaging ways. My Life with Charlie ...

Arthur E. Morgan (1878–1975) was a visionary who responded to a very high calling—the building of a perfect community, one based upon the bedrock of morality. He belonged to that late nineteenth-century ...

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) remarked on several occasions that the farther south one went in America, the more congenial life became. Though he sojourned elsewhere, he embraced the South, the region ...

Carl Gutherz (1844–1907), a Memphis artist of international note, lived and worked in the Mississippi Valley in the second half of the nineteenth century. After training at the École des Beaux-Arts ...