When I first started out as a writer, the nonfiction books that made the deepest impressions on me were the famous documentary works of James Agee & Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1939), Paul Taylor & Dorothea Lange (American Exodus, 1939), Harry Caudill (Night Comes to the Cumberlands, 1962) and Ralph McGill (The South and the Southerner, 1963). The world has changed a great deal since those books were written, but all of them taught me that journalism could (and should) be more than the interpretation of events; it could incorporate history, sociology, anthropology, and—most important—conscience. Many thanks to J.B., Becky Mason, and the Chattooga Conservancy for allowing me to use their photographs, which were taken in small towns across the South, for this site.
- B.D.