About the Author
Louis D. Rubin, Jr. was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1923. He graduated from the University of Richmond (B.A.) and the Johns Hopkins University (M.A., Ph.D.). He has been executive secretary of the American Studies Association and has taught at Johns Hopkins and Hollins College, and is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been awarded Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships, and two of his short stories have appeared in Best American Short Storiescollections. He is editor of the Southern Literary Studies Series of the Louisiana State University Press. He has published two novels, The Golden Weatherand Surfaces of a Diamond, as well as books on Southern and American literature and history, including Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth, No Place on Earth, The Faraway Country, The Curious Death of the Novel, The Wary Fugitives, The Writer in the South, The Teller in the Tale, George W. Cable, William Elliott Shoots a Bear, Virginia: A History, A Gallery of Southerners, and The Even-Tempered Angler. He has been president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.