"These essays from four decades show us how Ellen Douglas has been reading the great writers who have shaped her art, and how she has been thinking and feeling about events in the world from which her work draws energy and form. She remembers her youth and family. She tells about the circle of her friends, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, and others. She transcribes a first-person account of the violence on campus when James Meredith integrated Ole Miss. She looks back at her predecessors, including William Faulkner and the uncelebrated memoirist, Mary Hamilton, whose life in the early lumber camps along the river is no less amazing than any fiction."--BOOK JACKET.