Dirty Boots: Backwardness versus Progress

In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller’s sprawling rumination on returning to America from Europe in 1939 to avoid Hitler’s brutal charge, he wrote, “The South is full of eccentric characters; it still fosters individuality. And the most individualistic are of course from the land, from the out-of-the-way places.” Despite a gracious plenty of questionable statements in the book, Miller, whose fun-loving opportunism and wild obfuscation I admired as a twenty-something, praises the South as being among the last places that haven’t been made stale by faux-puritanical consumerism. The Deep South… Read more Dirty Boots: Backwardness versus Progress →