Between about 1910 and 1920, the Mobile Register’s
staff included two editors, Rice Gaither and Henry Herschel Brickell, who would
become prominent in the Southern Renaissance literary movement that began in
the late 1920s. Gaither’s wife Frances gained even more recognition for her
fiction than did her husband for his. Brickell is considered one of the
greatest literary critics of the first half of the 20th century and
his book reviews made the careers of many Renaissance-era writers.
Two other Register editors on the staff at the time,
Garrard Harris and David Rankin Barbee, also became well-known writers. They
don’t strictly fit the description for the Southern Renaissance, but they can
be considered along with their colleagues. The roots of the Renaissance perhaps
can be seen in Harris’ writing. Barbee, who went by his middle name Rankin, is
best known for writing about Southern history. While the Southern Renaissance
included historians, Barbee’s contempt for African Americans put him outside
the character of the movement.
During the Renaissance, Southern literature gained
considerable energy as writers, whose works would become American classics,
began their careers after World War I. The period marked the appearance of
writers such as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth
Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, Robert
Penn Warren, and Zora Neale Hurston among others.
Writers of the movement broke from common Southern cultural
literary themes, notably glorifying the antebellum South and the Confederacy.
They addressed the burden of slavery and racism. They were highly critical of contemporary
life in the South. Their works concerned the loss of personal identity in a
region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than a
personal life. Here is a look at each of the writers:
Rice and Frances Gaither
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| Rice Gaither |
The woman who would become Rice’s wife, Frances “Frankie”
Ormond Jones, also was born in Tennessee, about 16 miles north of La Grange in
Somerville, on May 21, 1889. Her family also moved to Corinth and in high
school Frankie became attracted to Rice “because he too wanted to be a writer.”
Frankie earned a bachelor’s degree from the Mississippi Industrial Institute
and College, now the Mississippi University for Women, in 1909.
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| Frances Gaither |
Rice seems to have joined the Mobile Register staff
soon after graduating from Ole Miss and he and Frankie married on April 25,
1912. Rice became city editor by 1914, and then the managing editor.
Though Rice worked in Mobile, he and Frankie invested in
considerable tracts of land in Baldwin County, including a house on Pomelo Street in Fairhope that they called “home.” Rice’s job at the Register
didn’t provide a salary that could afford those kind of investments, which
indicated that the couple could call on a good deal of family wealth.
For many years, the Gaithers used their Fairhope home as a
writing retreat. They wrote from 9 o’clock in the morning until 4 o’clock in
the afternoon. A sign on the front door said “No visitors until after 4 p.m.”
But during the weekends and in the late evenings, the
Gaithers opened their home to many of the South’s leading writers and artists.
The Gaithers’ hospitality was the subject of the Register’s society
editor Nettie Chandler in her popular column “Betty letters,” letters from the
fictitious Betty Bienville lavishly chronicling the goings on of Mobile society.
The columnist wrote that the Gaithers were “really old timey in their congeniality,”
meaning that they entertained people in their home rather than going out for
excitement.
Those who visited with the Gaithers included artist and
muralist John Roderick Dempster MacKenzie; popular journalist, novelist, and short
story writer Roark Bradford; and successful businessman and author of numerous
novels and short stories Williams March Campbell.
The Gaithers kept their Fairhope home even after Rice became
the managing editor of the Meridian Dispatch in Mississippi in late 1916.
In October 1917, Gaither became a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and
in 1929 the New York Times hired him as a reporter and feature writer.
Gaither worked for the Times until his death in 1953.
The Gaithers’ move to New York was designed to aid their
literary careers more than Gaither’s journalistic ambitions. While Rice
reported widely for the Times and had his short stories published in
leading literary magazines, it was Frankie’s writing that found the most
success and notice.
Working as a freelance writer, she published many short
stories and reviews, wrote one major biography, authored four children’s books
during the 1930s, and three novels in the 1940s.
As a novelist, Frankie belonged to a school of white Southern
writers who used literature to influence politics and advance black rights.
They viewed black characters and themes as part of American history and
literature and won praise for their sensitive treatments of these characters. One
side of Frances Gaither’s family hailed from Maine and the other Tennessee,
where her grandfather worked his cotton plantation with slaves. She pointed to
this family mix as the reason for her deep concern for the plight of blacks.
Gaither’s novels portrayed the antebellum South without mint
juleps, white columns, or contented slaves, a sharp contrast to Margaret
Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, which was published in 1936.
Reviewers for the New Yorker, New York Times, and the
Saturday Review of Literature highly praised her novel Follow the
Drinking Gourd, published in 1940, and re-issued in paperback in 1968. Her
last novel, Double Muscadine, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and
also garnered praise from reviewers. One of those reviewers happened to be the
Gaithers’ old friend and former colleague, Herschel Brickell. In his review for
the New York Times, Brickell proclaimed Double Muscadine “a novel
of unmistakable distinction.”
Frances Gaither died two years after her husband Rice at the home of relatives in Rockledge, Florida, on October
28, 1955.
Henry Herschel Brickell
Henry Herschel Brickell was born September 13, 1889, in Senatobia, Mississippi, but grew up in Yazoo City. With
an insatiable appetite for reading, Brickell spent hours in the Ricks Memorial Library and consumed one or two books a day after the school year
ended. In high school, he played right guard on the Yazoo Public School No. 1 football team and played in the state’s first interscholastic football match.
He graduated valedictorian of his class.
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| Herschel Brickell |
In 1909, Brickell served as editor-in-chief of the University
of Mississippi Magazine. Here he began encouraging such writers as Arthur
Palmer Hudson, whose first poem appeared in the magazine. Brickell also
reported “Locals,” one-sentence snippets on students’ comings and goings, for Varsity
Voice. Brickell’s fellow students elected him as president of his junior
class, but in 1910, after repeatedly failing math, Brickell left Ole
Miss without graduating and joined his friend Rice on the staff of the Mobile
Register. By 1914, he was the telegraph editor.
A battalion sergeant major of the 4th Alabama
Infantry, Brickell was called to Montgomery with 3,200 members of other units
of the National Guard on May 18, 1916. The troops were nationalized in June and
ordered in October to join regular Army troops along the border with Mexico to
guard against the raids of Poncho Villa. The Alabama units didn’t fight or even
cross the border.
[Note: Brickell’s biographers offer a confusing
timeline of Brickell’s life. During this period, for example, the Lives of
Mississippi Authors says that Brickell worked as a reporter for the Montgomery
Advertiser after leaving Ole Miss and was editor of a paper in Pensacola,
Florida, in 1914 before going with the Alabama National Guard to Mexico. None
of Brickell’s biographers mention his time at the Register. Also
Brickell wouldn’t have been in the Alabama National Guard if he was working in
Florida at the time. Lives also says Brickell served in the First
Regiment, but it is more likely he was in the Fourth.]
After the Mexico expedition, Brickell returned to
Mississippi and became editor of the Jackson Daily News. In 1918, he
married Norma Long of Jackson, and the following year the couple moved to New
York where Brickell worked on the copy desk of the Evening Post. From
1919 to 1923 he reported news stories and wrote editorials.
He found his passion in 1923 reviewing new books by Southern
authors in his daily column, “Books on Our Table.” Among the authors he
encouraged were Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Margaret Mitchell, Stark Young,
Langston Hughes, and William Alexander Percy. Over the next 30 years, Brickell
contributed reviews and essays to the New York Times, New York Herald
Tribune, Saturday Review of Literature, Atlantic Monthly, and
many other major publications. Brickell became recognized as one of the
country’s most influential book critics.
In 1928, Brickell became an editor for book publisher Henry
Holt and Company, where he sought out new literary talent. Brickell returned to
the Post as literary editor in 1934. He favorably reviewed Margaret
Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, published in 1936. Taken with the book,
Brickell traveled to Georgia that summer to meet Mitchell and they became
friends, writing and visiting over the years.
 |
| Edwin Grandberry, Margaret Mitchell, and Herschel Brickell |
During World War II, Brickell worked as senior cultural relations assistant to the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Columbia, returning to the
States in 1943 and working for the State Department until 1947. His government
service overlapped his literary work.
Brickell had his greatest influence on American literature
as editor of the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Short Stories yearly series
from 1941 to 1951. These collections of the best short stories published in U.S.
magazines introduced talented young fiction writers to a world audience. Authors Brickell presented
included Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, J. D. Salinger, and Ray Bradbury. Yazoo
City historian Sam Olden said, “Eudora Welty once told me that the first real
recognition she ever got was when he was editor of the O. Henry Memorial
Prize Stories and he selected her for an award.”
After a trip to research the state of humanities in South
America for the Rockefeller Foundation in 1952, Brickell and his wife returned
to their home, Acorn Cottage, in Ridgefield, Connecticut. One of his fellow
Mississippians, a fellow writer, and friend Stark Young lived nearby.
In 1952, Brickell and his wife Norma had begun preparing to
edit the next O. Henry short stories anthology. When Norma awoke on the
morning of May 29, she noted Herschell’s absence. She discovered their garage
door closed and her husband’s pajama-clad body inside the running car.
Brickell
left no message. “Hard work and a tendency to despondency were the reasons
suggested by police and physicians to account for Mr. Brickell’s death,” the Ridgefield
Press reported.
Garrard Harris
 |
| At the 1938 Bread Loaf Writers Conference, from left in chairs, historian Bernard DeVoto, poet Robert Frost, Herschel Brickell, and conference director Theodore Morrison. On steps, Frost's secretary Kay Morrison and writer Helen Everitt. |
Garrard Harris was born May 14, 1876, in Columbus, Georgia.
He attended the University of Georgia and North Georgia Agricultural College
before earning a law degree in 1902 from Millsap College in
Jackson,
Mississippi. He edited one of the capital’s newspapers for a time, married Mary
Lou Sykes on November 14, 1906, and practiced law in Jackson until 1911.
Harris’ official biographies show a gap in his career between
1911 and 1914, which must have been the time he was the associate editor at the
Register. He’s included among the staff listed in the One Hundredth
Anniversary & Seventy-third Annual Trade Review of the Register
issued in late 1914.
Harris also took on work with the government, some of which
may have overlapped his job at the Register but at some point became
full-time. He served as a special agent to Latin America with the U.S.
Department of Commerce from 1914-1917. For two years after that he served as a
specialist and editor with the Federal Board of Vocational Education, which had
state offices. Then he became a commissioner with the U.S. Department of
Commerce until 1920.
In the spring 1920, Birmingham News publisher Victor
H. Hanson hired Harris as associate editor, a job he held until his death in
1927.
Harris had shown an interest in writing fiction from an
early age. The magazine Short Stories published one of his stories in
November 1893 and he continued writing short stories until his death. Argosy
All-Story Weekly magazine also published his short stories. He wrote three
novels, Joe the Book Farmer, Trail of the Pearl, and Treasure
of the Land, all published by Harper and Brothers.
David Rankin Barbee
David Rankin Barbee was born on October 15, 1874, in
Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His father, a Methodist minister, was the first chaplain
commissioned by Jefferson Davis as Confederate president. It was highly
unlikely, then, that Rankin would reject his rebel heritage. Barbee viewed
himself as an “unreconstructed” Southerner.
Barbee attended Emory and Henry College in Emory, Virginia,
about 1892 and studied medicine 1895-96 at Vanderbilt University, without
receiving a degree. He once said he “never was graduated from anything from
kindergarten to the university.” He also never stayed at any one newspaper very
long:
- 1896-1899: reporter, Nashville Banner
- 1901: reporter, Nashville American
- 1901-1908: telegraph editor, Memphis Commercial Appeal
- 1908: editor, Chattanooga Star
- 1908-1910: news editor, Memphis Commercial Appeal
- 1910-1911: managing editor, Montgomery Advertiser
- 1911-1918: managing editor, Mobile Register
- 1918-1926: news editor, New Orleans States
- 1926-1928: managing editor, Asheville Citizen
- 1928-1932: feature writer, Washington Post
In 1928, the Washington Post
hired Barbee as a feature writer. His column “Profiles” earned a large and
loyal audience.
Barbee joined the Roosevelt administration in 1933 as a
public relations writer and moved around in departments as he had newspapers.
He started as an assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, then for the Federal
Alcohol Administration, followed by the Treasury Department.
From his retirement in 1942 until his death in 1958, Barbee
devoted his time to historical research. He had wide-ranging interests but
mainly focused on Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, confederate spy Rose O'Neil
Greenhow, and Southern history.
Barbee was a member of a generation of Southern historians
and writers who took seriously the need to present their understanding of the
South’s role in the growth of the national.
His articles appeared in such journals as Tyler's
Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine and the Southern
Churchman. Barbee also wrote about his research in letters to editors of newspapers
and periodicals. Barbee published two major works: Washington: City of
Mighty Events and An Excursion in Southern History.
Historian Terry A. Barnhart found that Barbee sometimes confused
different facts, indulged in hearsay evidence, and was prone to overstatement.
Barnhart also thought that Barbee let his Southern loyalties cloud his judgment.
Barbee’s judgment embroiled him in controversy in 1935.
Barbee claimed in an AP interview that Elizabeth Keckly, a formerly enslaved
woman who became dressmaker to First Mary Todd Lincoln, wasn’t the author of an
1868 memoir about the Lincolns’ lives in the White House. Barbee had a deeply
held belief that no black woman in 1868 “had enough culture to have written
such a book.”
Further research by the AP and amateur historian John E.
Washington proved Barbee wrong and resulted in Washington’s book They Knew
Lincoln published in 1941.
Barnhart accurately observed that “Barbee had a journalist’s
nose for a good story, wrote well, and compiled valuable source materials, but
he was still fighting the Civil War—self-consciously and fearlessly.”
Barbee died in Orange, Texas, on March 7, 1958.
