Fred Hobson

Much of my work has been in the area of American (and southern) literary and intellectual history and biography -- most recently, But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (Louisiana State University Press, 1999) and Mencken: A Life (Random House 1994). Earlier works -- Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, and The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World, among other works -- are also in these areas. My most recent edited works are South to the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-First Century (Georgia UP 2002) and Absalom, Absalom!: A Critical Casebook (Oxford UP 2003).

Currently I am working on a study (under contract with Oxford), "The Savage South: History of an Image." I am editor of the Southern Literary Studies series of the Louisiana State University Press and co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal.