Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington by Robert W. Hamblin (review)

In early 1965, University of Mississippi English professor Evans Harrington (1925–1997) took a stand that almost cost him his job. With the 1962 riot in response to James Meredith's arrival as the university's first African American student now two-and-a-half years past, the university sought to repair its academic image by hosting the Southern Literary Festival, with Harrington as its organizer and director. When Tougaloo College, a historically black school and headquarters for the Jackson, Mississippi, civil rights movement, applied to send a delegation to the event, Harrington paved the way for its attendance, which would make this the festival's first integrated meeting. The university administration had second thoughts and insisted on approval from the state university's governing board. In a letter to Chancellor John D. Williams, Harrington sharply criticized the university's timidity and promised to resign if Tougaloo's invitation were withdrawn, but the state board unexpectedly approved the University of Mississippi's hosting of the festival and the Tougaloo delegation's participation in it.

Robert W. Hamblin is a scholar of William Faulkner and a former student of Harrington's; Living in Mississippi: The Life and Times of Evans Harrington seeks "to highlight the principal aspects of [Harrington's] life and career that make him noteworthy" since he is "practically unknown beyond his native state" (pp. xii, xi). Beginning as a writer (he was the author of three mass-market paperback novels published under the pseudonym Gilbert Terrell in the 1960s), Harrington taught at the University of Mississippi from 1951 to 1988, eventually completing a Ph.D. and chairing the English Department. He "is representative of a type of southerner who is too often overlooked . . . a white southern moderate who, though definitely in the minority and at times even subjected to the threat of violence, refused to leave, . . . seeking to effect changes in the status quo" (p. 126).

The book's title comes from Harrington's 1966 essay "Living in Mississippi" (published in 1968 in Yale Review), "a poignant treatment of his ambivalent feelings about being a liberal in a conservative and often reactionary state and region that he dearly loved" (p. 21). Hamblin explores Harrington's life from three angles: political, academic, and literary. Harrington's political sensibilities came alive in response to the 1962 riot and found voice and action in the university's chapter of the American Association of University Professors, in a public letter responding to the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, and in participating in both the Mississippi Council on Human Relations and the American Civil Liberties Union. This activism made Harrington a surveillance target of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. As an academic, Harrington is best known for cofounding (with Ann J. Abadie) the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi in 1974 and directing it through 1994. His teaching, scholarship, and leadership made their mark on the university and its students, including his mentoring of writers such as Steve Yarbrough, Jere Hoar, and Julie Smith. Harrington's academic commitments eclipsed his literary career, and he virtually abandoned fiction writing after the 1960s. The son and grandson of Southern Baptist preachers, he became "something of an agnostic" as an adult, and his novels reflect his rebellion against a white Christianity too closely intertwined with white supremacy and segregation (p. 5).

Hamblin's book benefits from a wide range of sources, including Harrington's published writings, several unpublished manuscripts, personal letters, and Hamblin's interviews with numerous colleagues and friends of Harrington's. Of special interest are Harrington's letters to his close friend Robert Canzoneri, author of "I Do So Politely": A Voice from the South (1965); Harrington wrote him between 1956 and 1977 with revealing candor and introspection. Hamblin's intimate portrait of "a man-in-the-middle, pulled in opposing directions by the cultural forces that...