An Evans Harrington Reader

An esteemed professor and civil libertarian, Evans Harrington was a prominent figure in the Mississippi civil rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s. As the fiction and essays in this volume evidence, he was also an accomplished writer. Drawing upon the Evans Harrington Collection at the University of Mississippi, as well as unpublished materials in the possession of Harrington’s daughter, Donna Harrington Vinson, Robert W. Hamblin, Harrington’s biographer, has carefully chosen and edited thirteen short stories, five novel excerpts, and three essays to demonstrate Harrington’s literary achievement. Several of the selections are published here for the first time. In his introduction to the volume noted author Steve Yarbrough recalls Harrington as an inspiring teacher and mentor and offers his critique of the various pieces, which, as Yarbrough notes, “reveal a writer who is every bit as confident when writing about life on a depression-era dirt farm as he is depicting the foibles of academia, as well as one who is not afraid to confront such subjects as incarceration, adultery, alcoholism, or murder.” Evans Harrington is a writer who deserves to be better known. Not unlike Faulkner, Welty, Wright, and other famous Mississippi authors, Harrington possesses the gift of transforming characters and events of his native region into stories with universal meaning and significance.