Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

Biography

Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. is the director of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, where he is the Emily Brown Jefferies Professor of English and the Claude Henry Neuffer Professor of Southern Studies. His most recent book, The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950 (Louisiana, 2009), won the Association of American Publishers 2009 PROSE Award.

See Work

CRITICISM / Fall 2015

Scout Comes Home Again

By Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

As admirable and courageous as the film’s Atticus is, this lionization goes way too far in construing the novel’s Atticus in our memory as some sort of social reformer. 
CRITICISM / Summer 2015

T. Geronimo Johnson’s ‘Welcome to Braggsville’: On Race, Culture, and the War Within

By Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

Welcome to Braggsville’s complex structure suggests that Johnson is upping the ante of his artistic enterprise, pushing the limits of narrative and taking greater risks to get his message across.
CRITICISM / Winter 2014

New Fiction of the Great Flood of 1927

By Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

In terms of scale and scope of destruction, the series of floods that struck the Mississippi River system in the spring of 1927 (now known simply as “the great flood of 1927”) is regarded as one of the nation’s greatest natural disasters...
CRITICISM / Summer 2013

Discovering Gold in the Back of Beyond: The Fiction of Ron Rash

By Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

The title of Ron Rash’s compelling new collection of stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay, comes from Robert Frost’s evocative poem pondering the bittersweet knowledge of life’s impermanence. 
CRITICISM / Winter 2013

Legacies of Desire in the Delta

By Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

Percy, who died in 1942, was a leading citizen of Greenville, Mississippi, a prominent lawyer, a large-scale planter, and a man who through private example and public service continuously fought to maintain unruffled genteel order amidst...
CRITICISM / Winter 1995

Hearing Lillian Smith

By Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

Near the end of her life when she was apparently thinking about doing some autobiographical writing, Lillian Smith told a friend that “to tell the truth I have so many selves that I wonder sometimes how I’d do an autobiography.”