Author: Leanne E. Smith

a freelance writer and photographer, English instructor, musician, and member of the Green Grass Cloggers in Greenville, North Carolina. She is the author of miscellaneous articles and the book East Carolina University: Off the Record (2007)
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Reviewer, The

The Reviewer was a Richmond-based experimental literary magazine published from 1921 until 1925 in thirty-five issues that helped spark the Southern Literary Renaissance. With an open editorial policy, it offended some and earned praise from others because the submissions simultaneously invoked the Old South, called for a New South, and addressed controversial social perspectives with work from established and emerging writers.

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Marshall W. Fishwick (1923–2006)

Marshall Fishwick was a multidisciplinary scholar, professor, writer, and editor who started the academic movement known as popular culture studies and established the journal International Popular Culture. In 1970 he cofounded the Popular Culture Association with Ray B. Browne and Russel B. Nye, and the three worked to shape a new academic discipline that blurred the traditional distinctions between high and low culture, focusing on mass culture mediums like television and the Internet and cultural archetypes like comic book heroes. In an academic career of more than fifty years, Fishwick wrote or edited more than forty books, including works on popular culture, Virginia history, and American studies. Fishwick was a popular professor—the novelist Tom Wolfe called him “the most magnetic teacher I have ever known”—who taught at Washington and Lee University in Lexington and later at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, where he retired in 2003.

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Emily Tapscott Clark (ca. 1890–1953)

Emily Tapscott Clark was a writer and the founding editor of The Reviewer, a Richmond-based literary magazine that helped spark the Southern Literary Renaissance—a movement in southern letters that turned away from glorifying the Old South in sentimental narratives (by such writers as Thomas Nelson Page) and instead moved toward writing about themes of race, gender, identity, and the burden of history in the South. While Clark caused some uproar in Richmond society with the publication of Stuffed Peacocks (1927), a set of thirteen satirical character sketches with a biting introduction about the city of Richmond itself, she is known primarily for her contributions to and nurturing of the evolution of southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s.

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