After twenty years in New York City, a prize-winning writer takes a "long look back" at his hometown of Mobile, Alabama.
In Back Home: Journeys through Mobile, Roy Hoffman tells stories—through essays, feature articles, and memoir—of one of the South's oldest and most colorful port cities. Many of the pieces here grew out of Hoffman's work as Writer-in-Residence for his hometown newspaper, the Mobile Register, a position he took after working in New York City for twenty years as a journalist, fiction writer, book critic, teacher, and speech writer. Other pieces were first published in the New York Times, Southern Living, Preservation, and other publications. Together, this collection comprises a long, second look at the Mobile of Hoffman's childhood and the city it has since become.
Like a photo album, Back Home presents close-up portraits of everyday places and ordinary people. There are meditations on downtown Mobile, where Hoffman's grandparents arrived as immigrants a century ago; the waterfront where longshoremen labor and shrimpers work their nets; the back roads leading to obscure but intriguing destinations. Hoffman records local people telling their own tales of race relations, sports, agriculture, and Mardi Gras celebrations. Fishermen, baseball players, bakers, authors, political figures--a strikingly diverse population walks across the stage of Back Home.
Throughout, Hoffman is concerned with stories and their enduring nature. As he writes, "When buildings are leveled, when land is developed, when money is spent, when our loved ones pass on, when we take our places a little farther back every year on the historical time-line, what we have still are stories."
Antebellum Mobile was a cotton port city, and economic dependence upon the North created by the cotton trade controlled the city’s development. Mobile’s export trade placed the city third after New York and New Orleans in total value of exports for the nation by 1860. Because the exports consisted almost entirely of cotton headed for Northern and foreign textile mills, Mobile depended on Northern businessmen for marketing services. Nearly all the city’s imports were from New York: Mobile had the worst export-import imbalance of all antebellum ports.
"An engaging biography [and] a colorful tale. . . . Robert Farmar, a son of New Jersey, used his position among that colony's elite to secure a commission as a captain in the British Army during the War of Jenkins' Ear and King George's War, serving in the unsuccessful assaults at Cartegena, Cuba, and Panama and then in the disaster at Fontenoy in Flanders and in the reversals at Rocoux and Laffeldt. . . . During the Seven Years' War he participated in the capture of Havana.
An archaeological guide to the earliest French settlement on the northern Gulf Coast. Archaeological excavations since 1989 have uncovered exciting evidence of the original townsite of Mobile, first capital of the Louisiana colony, and remnants of the colony's port on Dauphin Island.
“Higginbotham has given to American historiography a microcosmic view of one of the earliest and most important outposts in the colonial new world. The Latin South can henceforth not be ignored.” —Alabama Historical Quarterly
“The definitive account . . . superbly recounted.” —Journal of Southern History
“Meticulously documented. . . . Recommended for libraries interested in the colonial period.” —Choice
“Mind-boggling . . . a stupendous job of research. It is amazing that Higginbotham can recreate in such detail the lives of these people. All history books should be written like this.” —BirminghamMagazine
Eugene Walter’s first novel, and winner of the 1954 Lippincott Fiction Prize for Young Novelists, is about a young man from a small central Alabama town who goes south of the “salt line” to Mobile to work in a bank and study law. As soon as this unnamed pilgrim arrives, he realizes that—although he is still in Alabama—he has entered a separate physical kingdom of banana trees and palm fronds, subtropical heat and humidity, and old houses and lacy wrought-iron balconies. In Mobile, Alabama, the town that can claim the oldest Mardi Gras in America, there is no Puritan work ethic; the only ruling forces are those of chaos, craziness, and caprice. Such forces overtake the pilgrim, seduce him away from the beaten career path, and set him on a zigzag course through life.
The Untidy Pilgrim celebrates the insularity as well as the eccentricity of southerners—and Mobilians, in particular—in the mid-twentieth century. Cut off from the national mainstream, they are portrayed as devoid of that particularly American angst over what to “do” and accomplish with one’s life, and indulge instead in art, music, cooking, nature, and love. In this novel Walter dispels the gloomy southern literary tradition established by Faulkner, Capote, and McCullers to illuminate the joyous quirkiness of human existence.
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