Frye Gaillard will read from and discuss A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibilities and Innocence Lost
MONTGOMERY – The Alabama Writers’ Forum, a partnership program of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, will present “Frye Gaillard: One Man’s Take on A Decade” from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 30, at The Alabama Contemporary Arts Center. The event is free of charge and open to the public.
The Alabama Contemporary Arts Center is located at 301 Conti Street in Mobile.
Gaillard’s new book A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibilities and Innocence Lost explores the competing story arcs of tragedy and hope through the social and political movements of the times – civil rights, black power, women’s liberation, the War in Vietnam, and the protests against it. He also examines cultural changes manifested in music, art, religion, and science.
Following a reading by Gaillard of selected passages, the program will include a discussion of American music icons and politics with Philip Shirley, author of the recent novel The Graceland Conspiracy. Books will be available for sale and signing.
“There are many different ways to remember the sixties,“ Gaillard writes, “and this is mine. There was in these years the sense of a steady unfolding of time, as if history were on a forced march, and the changes spread to every corner of our lives. As future historians debate the meaning of a decade, I hope to offer a sense of how it felt to have lived it. A Hard Rain is one writer’s reconstruction of a transcendent era.”
Frye Gaillard is writer in residence at the University of South Alabama and John Egerton Scholar in Residence at the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of more than 30 books, including Go South to Freedom, Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters, and The Books That Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir. Gaillard is winner of the Lillian Smith Award, the Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction, and the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Distinction in Literary Scholarship.
