Overview

In her inimitable storytelling style, Mrs. Windham takes readers on a tour of the history, people, and places of the """"heart of Dixie."""" First published in 1975 and long out of print, Alabama: One Big Front Porch is now reissued in a handsome new edition. Alabama, they say, is like one big front porch where folks gather on summer nights to tell tales and to talk family. Everybody, they say, is kin to everybody else—or knows somebody who is. It’s a sprawling porch, stretching from the Tennessee River valley to the sandy Gulf beaches with its sides sometimes slipping over into Mississippi and Georgia. The tale-tellers don’t all look alike and they don’t all talk alike, but the stories they tell are all alike in their unmistakable Southern blend of exaggeration, humor, pathos, folklore, and romanticism. Family history is woven into the stories. And pride. And humor. Always humor.

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9781588383747

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Kathryn Tucker Windham (1918-2011) grew up in Thomasville, Alabama. She graduated from Huntingdon College in 1939, married Amasa Benjamin Windham in 1946, and had three children before being widowed in 1956. A newspaper reporter by profession, her career spanned four decades, beginning in the shadow of the Great Depression and continuing through the Civil Rights Movement, which she observed at ground level in her adopted home town of Selma. In the 1970s, she left journalism and worked as a coordinator for a federally funded agency for programs for the elderly. She continued to write, take photographs, and tell stories. The storytelling was an outgrowth of her 1969 book, 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey. More volumes of ghost stories, folklore, recipes, and essays followed; she has now published more than twenty books. Her reputation as a storyteller led to thirty-three appearances over an eighteen-month period on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, which introduced her to an even larger audience. She has written, produced, and acted in a one-woman play, My Name Is Julia, about pioneering social reformer Julia Tutwiler, has narrated several television documentaries, and is a regular interviewee for national and international journalists visiting Alabama in search of the Old or the New South. It is a testament to the good humor, keen intelligence, and life-long curiosity of one of the region’s best known public citizens that she can guide visitors unerringly to either mythical place.

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