“I don’t have any children, so I’ve decided to claim all the future freedom-fighters and hell-raisers as my kin,” wrote journalist Molly Ivins. Ivins is one of the biggest hell-raisers profiled in this collection of essays by Hal Crowther, but there is plenty hell-raising and freedom-fighting to go around. Crowther is a writer whose own career is marked by sharp political and social commentary in the pages of national and regional outlets, from Time to the Atlanta Constitution to The Oxford American. In Freedom Fighters and Hell Raisers, he turns his attention to the best and the brightest of the recently departed generation in the South.

Hal Crowther is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Oxford American, Granta, the Independent, the Progressive Populist, and other independent weeklies around the country. He is the author of four books of essays: An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken; Gather at the River; Cathedrals of Kudzu; and Unarmed but Dangerous: A Withering Attack on All Things Phony, Foolish, and Fundamentally Wrong with America Today. Crowther is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Lillian Smith Book Award, and the Book of the Year award for essays from Foreward Reviews. He has been named a finalist for the Magazine Award and for the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism and for nonfiction. He lives in Hillsborough, NC, with his wife, novelist Lee Smith.  (Blair Publishing)

Co-sponsored with Compass Rose Books. Made possible thanks to generous support from the Rose and Samuel Rudman Library Trust/MCF and Witherle Friends of the Library

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