Tell About the South: Voices in Black and White, Pt. 2--Prophets & Poets

Describing the power of Richard Wright's (Native Son) language, critic Stanley Crouch compares it to the guillotine ("Whoomp. The head in the basket. There it is.") Wright--who was born in the South, joined the great migration north to Chicago, and eventually emigrated to Paris where he died under mysterious circumstances in 1960--is one of several writers whose lives and work are explored in the second part of Ross Spear's Tell About the South, a trilogy tracing the history of modern Southern literature. Combining interviews with Alice Walker, Willie Morris, Eudora Welty, Pat Conroy, Shelby Foote, Nikki Giovanni, Margaret Walker, Cleanth Brooks and others, this engaging and informative series, hosted by Rita Dove, examines the distinctly Southern literary legacy of such notable authors as Welty, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Lilian Smith and Flannery O'Connor, particularly in the light of the South's complex relationship between blacks and whites. In addition to archival footage and wonderful interviews, Tell About the South also includes dramatizations of segments from the works of the writers profiled. While viewers will notice a bit of overlap between the first and second parts in the trilogy (particularly in the section on Faulkner), Prophets & Poets covers much new ground, ranging from insights into Lilian Smith's sensational but fiercely bold novel "Strange Fruit" to an introduction to one of the most disturbing Southern writers of this century, the tragically short-lived Flannery O'Connor (anyone who took an American literature survey course in college surely remembers the shock of first encountering O'Connor's work in a story such as "A Good Man is Hard to Find"). Sure to be a popular resource for students of Southern literature, book groups, and documentary aficionados, this is recommended. [Note: Pt. 1, simply called Tell About the South is also available; Pt. 3 will appear later this year.] Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)