1-58838-103-X
$20.00 paperback
252 pages
5 1/2" x 8 1/2"
NewSouth Books
|
The late John Beecher, though
descended from the abolitionist Beechers, grew up in Birmingham,
Alabama, where his father was a steel industry executive. Beecher
himself was groomed for a similar role, but when he went into the mills
as a young man in the Great Depression, he rebelled and began to write
radical, powerful, activist poetry. A contemporary of Woody
Guthrie and John Steinbeck, he became a similar chronicler of massive
human displacement of the economic upheaval of the 1930s. During
World War I, he served as an officer in the interracial crew of troop
transport Booker T. Washington, and wrote a book about his
experiences. In the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted. And in
the civil rights era, he turned his attention to the evils of
segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. Always, he wrote powerful, spare
verse which in lesser hands might have been ruined by its outrage
With his artist wife Barbara, he published several elegant collections
of poetry on his own hand set letterpress. His books included Report
to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, In Egypt Land, and a
1974 Macmillan edition of collected poems. All are out of
print.
about the editor
Steven Ford Brown is a writer, editor, and translator whose books
include Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Angel Gonzalez,
1965-1986; Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern
Poetry; and Century of the Death of the Rose: The Selected Poems
of Jorge Carrera Andrade (NewSouth Books, 2002) |
