The Open Road Blog

“Shirley Ann Grau’s quill is filled with gold.” —The New York Times

Open Road Integrated Media announces the ebook publication of six titles by widely respected and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Shirley Ann Grau. Primarily writing about her native South, Grau deals with race relations and the broad social and political changes of the twentieth century. She has been described by Library Journal as “one of the novel’s finest practitioners.”

Grau’s The Keepers of the House traces the history of the distinguished Howland family and the long-buried secret that threatens to destroy them. It is up to Abigail Howland ...

Open Road’s Critical Symposium returns this week with a new series focusing on the great Southern novelist Walker Percy. The central theme of Percy’s work was the decline of religion and spirituality in modern society. We’ve therefore asked our contributors to discuss this aspect of Percy’s work and how he handled questions of faith in his own life.

We begin with an essay by Brent Short, who conducted an in-depth interview with Percy in 1990 after the publication of The Thanatos Syndrome. In his essay, Short describes how he became interested in Percy’s work and what it was ...

The photograph shows author Alice Walker being arrested and taken into custody during a protest in Concord, California in the 1980s, against weapons shipments being sent to Central and South America. Her shirt “Remember Port Chicago,” refers to an explosion during World War II that killed mostly black sailors, which occurred while the sailors were loading munitions.

Born the youngest of eight children, Alice Walker was raised by parents who believed in the power of education, despite being a family of black sharecroppers in the South. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1956, she moved back to the South, ...

One More River, Mary Glickman’s captivating follow-up to her bestselling debut, Home in the Morning, tells the epic tale of ordinary men caught in the grip of calamity, and inspired to extraordinary acts in the name of love.

It’s 1962 in Guilford, Mississippi, and Mickey Moe Levy must prove his pedigree to the disapproving parents of his girlfriend, Laura Anne Needleman, to win her hand in marriage. With only a few decades-old leads to go on, Mickey Moe sets out to uncover his father’s murky past, from his travels up and down the length of the Mississippi River ...

In this week’s archival photo, author Erskine Caldwell leans on a sign that alludes to his most famous novel, Tobacco Road. Later adapted to a play, the show ran for nearly eight years, earning Caldwell a hefty sum in royalties. Caldwell will forever be associated with the vast tobacco regions of the American South, which are also known as Tobacco Road.

Caldwell was raised as a child of the South. His family lived in a number of southern cities and rural areas, places that would later help frame his writing. A devout preacher, Caldwell’s father instilled in his son ...

Today would have been the 96th birthday of Walker Percy, author of the bestselling, critically-acclaimed novel The Moviegoer. To celebrate we decided to interview Padgett Powell (The Interrogative Mood), one of today's most respected Southern writers, about Percy's legacy.

Open Road Media: How did you first encounter the works of Walker Percy?

Padgett Powell: In college, probably sent to him by a remark in [James] Dickey’s Sorties that Percy is more “quietly original” than someone else, or maybe someone else was more quietly original than yet someone else, but Percy, whom I'd never heard of, was mentioned. ...