Back Home: Journeys through Mobile

Roy Hoffman

ISBN 10: 0817310452 / ISBN 13: 9780817310455

Published by University Alabama Press, 2001

May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0817310452I4N00

Synopsis:

After twenty years in New York City, a prize-winning writer takes
a ""long look back"" at his hometown of Mobile, Alabama.

In Back Home: Journeys through Mobile, Roy Hoffman
tells stories--through essays, feature articles, and memoir--of one of
the South's oldest and most colorful port cities. Many of the pieces here
grew out of Hoffman's work as Writer-in-Residence for his hometown newspaper,
the Mobile Register, a position he took after working in New York
City for twenty years as a journalist, fiction writer, book critic, teacher,
and speech writer. Other pieces were first published in the New York
Times, Southern Living, Preservation, and other publications.
Together, this collection comprises a long, second look at the Mobile of
Hoffman's childhood and the city it has since become.

Like a photo album, Back Home presents close-up
portraits of everyday places and ordinary people. There are meditations
on downtown Mobile, where Hoffman's grandparents arrived as immigrants
a century ago; the waterfront where longshoremen labor and shrimpers work
their nets; the back roads leading to obscure but intriguing destinations.
Hoffman records local people telling their own tales of race relations,
sports, agriculture, and Mardi Gras celebrations. Fishermen, baseball players,
bakers, authors, political figures--a strikingly diverse population walks
across the stage of Back Home.

Throughout, Hoffman is concerned with stories and their
enduring nature. As he writes, ""When buildings are leveled, when land is
developed, when money is spent, when our loved ones pass on, when we take
our places a little farther back every year on the historical time-line,
what we have still are stories.""

About the Author: Roy Hoffman is author of the novels Almost Family, winner of the Lillian Smith Award for fiction, and Chicken Dreaming Corn, a BookSense pick endorsed by Harper Lee. He is author of two essay collections, Back Home: Journeys Through Mobile and Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations, and his articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Fortune, Southern Living, and the Mobile Press-Register, where he was a long-time staff writer. A graduate of Tulane University who worked as a journalist and speechwriter in New York City before moving back south to Fairhope, Ala., he received the Clarence Cason Award in nonfiction from the University of Alabama and is on the faculty of the Spalding Brief Residency MFA in Writing Program. On the web: www.Facebook.com/RoyHoffmanWriter
|Roy Hoffman is author of the novels Almost Family, winner of the Lillian Smith Award for fiction, and Chicken Dreaming Corn, a BookSense pick endorsed by Harper Lee. He is author of two essay collections, Back Home: Journeys Through Mobile and Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations, and his articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Fortune, Southern Living, and the Mobile Press-Register, where he was a long-time staff writer. A graduate of Tulane University who worked as a journalist and speechwriter in New York City before moving back south to Fairhope, Ala., he received the Clarence Cason Award in nonfiction from the University of Alabama and is on the faculty of the Spalding Brief Residency MFA in Writing Program. On the web: www.Facebook.com/RoyHoffmanWriter
 

 

 

Bibliographic Details

Title: Back Home: Journeys through Mobile
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Publication Date: 2001
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket