Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South »

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of nineteen other books, most recently Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans. He is a panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! a columnist for Oxford American, a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly, and president of the Authors Guild. He lives in western Massachusetts.

In this acerbic, eminently quotable book, humorist Roy Blount Jr. focuses on his own dueling loyalties across the great American divide. Scholarly, raunchy, biting, and affable, Blount takes on topics ranging from chicken fingers and yellow dog Democrats to Elvis’s toes while sharing some experiences of his own: chatting with Ray Charles, meeting an Okefenokee alligator, imagining Faulkner’s tennis game, and being swept up, sort of, in the filming of Nashville. His yarns, analyses, and flights of fancy transcend all standard shades of Red, Blue, and in between.
Blount’s sidesplitting, irreverent musings may not end our tacit Civil War at long last, but they do clarify, or aptly complicate, divisive delusions on both sides of the long-standing national rift. Long Time Leaving is a comic ode to American variety and a droll assault on complacency both North and South from one of the most definitive and esteemed humorists of our time.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Christopher Dickey

I had to stop reading this book in public. I laughed out loud too often and too uproariously for the company in a bus or plane or cafe. What was worse, if I tried to explain myself my Southern accent, usually kept in check when I m traveling in the North or abroad (where I live), came back like kudzu after a summer rain.

I Introduction

Bringing in the Sheaves 3

II Setting the Table

Why I'm Not an Outsider Artist 17

The Right Shade of Blue? 20

First, Tell Me What Kind of Reader You Are 24

Out-of-Pants Experience 28

Do You Know the Nothin' Man? 33

You Hate Me Because I'm Southern 37

The Rapture: Lighten Up 42

Total Immersion, Up to a Point 45

Don't Force It: An Introduction to Up from Methodism 49

Can't I Be the Most Sophisticated Something Else? 53

Why Communism Didn't Originate in South Carolina 58

How about This Peculiar Institution? 62

The Worm Bubble 65

Gothic Baseball 69

III Eating

Giving Good Gravy 77

The Way Folks Were Meant to Eat 80

Meat, Three, Wallace Stevens, and Me 83

Mammy's Little Baby Loves What, Exactly? 86

Food-Song Maven 91

Chicken 97

What Undid Uncle Bud 101

The Terrys Do It Right 104

A Grapefruit Moment 109

IV Reading

The Plurality of Y'all 115

The Peer Group That I Hesitate to Speak Its Name 121

Listen Up, Youth 126

Southern Humor: Love It or Leave It 129

So Many Writers. Why? 134

The Thwock and the Fury: Faulkner's Tennis 138

In Elysium 142

Confronting My Whiteness 143

Little Truman, Happy at Last 147

The Best of Gaynelle 151

Oh, Come on, Smiley 157

Fresh Mark 163

Bits of Twain for Brits 165

True Portis 175

Those Shakespeherian Blues 178

V Watching, Listening

Brother Ray: What He Said 185

Violinist and Panther: Brother Dave 189

The Clampetts Never Got to Whack Anybody 195

Not to Nashville, Yes to O Brother 199

When the Lights Go Down South 204

A Wang Dang Doodle Dandy? 215

Cruelty to Elvis 220

The King Was in the Countinghouse, Counting Out His Toes 224

LoveThose Bozzies 229

He's Crossed Over to Classic 233

Deja Ahooey 235

Country Song Entitlement 240

Memphis Minnie's Blues: A Dirty Mother for You 245

VI Traveling

Me and Bobby E. Lee 257

See the World But Don't Get Carried Away 262

Right out There with the Dogs 269

Dogs Whose Parents Got Out 275

Snakes Alive 277

Babel to Byzantium 282

Augusta Un-Mastered 287

Atlanta Explained 294

The Olympics: "Atlanta Will Be Done Away" 304

The Varsity Is Local 308

The Guy-Crowded Gulf (1993) 312

The Bottom Line (2005) 318

There Be Alligators 321

Hanging with the Klan 330

VII Politicking

Double-Bubba Bubble (1992) 341

Briefly (1992) 342

Bill, You're Due 344

A Makeover for Uncle Sam? (1995) 350

The New Southern Manhood (1995) 354

He May Be a Dog, But He's Our Dog 359

Sometimes Higbe's That Way (1998) 362

Slick Willie and the Marble Model (2000) 366

Yellow-dogma 369

Looking Back on Bill (2000) 373

How Bad Could It Be? (2000) 376

The Story So Far (2006) 379