When Virginia’s Royal Governor, William Gooch, sailed for England in 1749, he left behind a “state of affairs in which all seemed ordered and tranquil and―to those whose opinions mattered―reasonably permanent.” It was the first such time in Virginia’s history but, writes author Louis Rubin, it would not be the last. From the beginning, Virginians have styled their government a conservative commonwealth, seeking stability amid change and often fashioning change to fit their concept of what Virginia―and America―should be like. In the eighteenth century Golden Age, Virginia was a world of broad acres and country gentlemen. To preserve the world, Virginians led a revolution and helped to found a government that they believed would secure their children’s future. In the name of old and tried principles, Virginians in 1861 seceded from the Union to defend a way of life that to them seemed worth fighting for. In the twentieth century, they “paid as they went,” convinced that debt meant the end of good government.

VIRGINIA: A BICENTENNIAL HISTORY

History

Rubin Jr., Louis D.

Americas

W. W. Norton & Co c1977

John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren―each began his career as one of the coterie of southern poets centered at Vanderbilt University who attracted national attention with their publication of The Fugitive magazine in the early 1920s and the celebrated essays in I’ll Take My Stand. Collectively known as the Fugitives (or Agrarians as they were later called) they became ardent and influential participants in the regionalist-proletarian literary controversies of the Depression decades.
Each of the four poets was personally concerned with the connection between their creative work and the social realities around them. In The Wary Fugitives Louis Rubin masterfully explores and illustrates the relationships between their poetry, novels, and literary criticism, and their work as social critics. He conducts, in the process, a revealing and provocative inquiry into the connection between American history and the twentieth-century South.

The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History (Paperback))

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

LSU Press

The flowering of literary imagination known as the American Renaissance had few roots in the South. While Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were creating a body of work that would endure, the only southern writer making a lasting contribution was Edgar Allan Poe. This failure on the part of antebellum southern writers has long been a subject of debate among students of southern history and literature. Now one of the region's most distinguished men of letters offers a cogently argued and gracefully written account of the circumstances that prevented early southern writers from creating transcendent works of art. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., brings forty years of critical integrity and imaginative involvement with the history and literature of the South to his informal inquiry into the foundations of the southern literary imagination. His exploration centers on the lives and works of three of the most important writers of the pre-Civil War South: Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod. In a close and highly original reading of Poe's poetry and fiction, Rubin shows just how profoundly growing up in Richmond, Virginia, influenced that writer. The sole author of the Old South whose work has endured did not use southern settings or concern himself with his region's history or politics. Poe was, according to Rubin, in active rebellion against the middle-class community of Richmond and its materialistic values. Simms, on the other hand, aspired to the plantation society ideal of his native Charleston, South Carolina. He was not the most devoted and energetic of southern writers and one of the country's best-known and most respected literary figures before the Civil War. Rubin finds an explanation for much of the lost promise of antebellum southern literature in Simms's career. Here was a talented man who got caught up in the politically obsessed plantation community of Charleston, becoming an apologist for the system and an ardent defender of slavery. Timrod, also a Charlestonian native, was a highly gifted poet whose work attained the stature of literature when the Civil War gave him a theme. He was known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy. Only when his region was locked in a desperate military struggle for the right to exist did he suddenly find his enduring voice. Anyone interested in southern life and literature will welcome his provocative and engaging new look at southern writing from one of the region's most perceptive critics.

The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South

The Curious Death of the Novel: Essays in American Literature

Small Craft Advisory is an enchanting book about Louis Rubin’s obsession with boats and his years of often hilarious boating adventures. When Louis Rubin was thirteen, he built a leaky little boat and paddled it out to the edge of the ship channel in Charleston, South Carolina, where he felt the inexorable pull of the water. Fifty years and dozens of boats latersailboats, powerboats, inboards and outboardsthe pull is as strong as ever. In the tradition established by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville, distinguished author and scholar Louis Rubin explores man’s longtime passion for boats. He examines the compulsion that has prompted him and hundreds of thousands of other non-nautical persons to spend so much time, and no small portion of their incomes, on watercraft that they can use only infrequently. As his new boat (a cabin cruiser made of wood on a workboat hull) is being built, Rubin tells of his past boats and numerous boating disasters and draws a poignant comparison between his two passions: watercraft and the craft of writing. Anyone who has ever bought and owned a boator wondered why people are obsessed by themwill love this amusing, evocative, beautifully crafted memoir by an inveterate boat-owner.

Small Craft Advisory: A Book About the Building of a Boat

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crafts & Hobbies

Atlantic Monthly Press

Growing up in Charleston in the 1930s and 1940s, accomplished storyteller Louis Rubin witnessed firsthand the subtle gradations of caste and class among neighborhoods, from south of Broad Street where established families, ancestral glories, and traditional mores held sway, to the various enclaves of Uptown in which middle-class and blue-collar families went about their own diverse lives and routines. Changing circumstances within his own family impelled his absorption in what seemed to be two separate worlds, and granted him a remarkable perspective into Charleston's evolving identity as an historic seaport on the cusp of modernity during the Great Depression and the onset of World War II.
In Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston, Rubin draws on equal parts autobiography and imagination in a series of briskly paced renderings of his native Charleston that capture the atmosphere of the Holy City during this era when the population had not yet swelled above sixty-five thousand, when oldtimers still spoke with awe of the 1886 earthquake, and when the coming social and economic revolutions that shaped the latter half of the twentieth century had not yet found a toehold in the old city. Rubin's wide-eyed narrator is an earnest and observant guide, who ably takes readers on excursions to and through recognizable landmarks, including Adger's Wharf, the Battery, Union Terminal, the shops of King Street, the High School of Charleston, the Majestic Theater, and the College of Charleston. With youthful glee he watches the barges and shrimp trawlers along the waterfront, rides streetcars down Rutledge Avenue and trains to Savannah and Richmond, paddles the Ashley River in a leaky homemade boat, pitches left-handed for the youngest team in the Twilight Baseball League, ponders the curious chanting coming from the Jewish Community Center, and catches magical glimpses of the Morris Island lighthouse from atop the Folly Beach Ferris wheel. His fascination with the gas-electric Boll Weevil train epitomizes his appreciation for the freedom of movement between the worlds of Uptown and Downtown that defines his youth in Charleston.

Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston: Sketches and Stories (Non Series)

Jr., Louis D. Rubin

Contemporary

University of South Carolina Press

Growing up in Charleston in the 1930s and 1940s, accomplished storyteller Louis Rubin witnessed firsthand the subtle gradations of caste and class among neighborhoods from south of Broad Street where established families and traditional mores held sway to the various enclaves of Uptown in which middle-class and blue-collar families went about their own diverse lives and routines. In Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston, Rubin draws on autobiography and imagination in briskly paced renderings of his native Charleston that capture the atmosphere of the Holy City during an era when the population had not yet swelled above sixty-five thousand. Rubin�s wide-eyed narrator takes readers on excursions to Adger�s Wharf, the Battery, Union Terminal, the shops of King Street, the Majestic Theater, the College of Charleston, and other recognizable landmarks. With youthful glee he watches the barges and shrimp trawlers along the waterfront, rides streetcars down Rutledge Avenue and trains to Savannah and Richmond, paddles the Ashley River in a leaky homemade boat, pitches left-handed for the youngest team in the Twilight Baseball League, ponders the curious chanting coming from the Jewish Community Center, and catches magical glimpses of the Morris Island lighthouse from atop the Folly Beach Ferris wheel. His fascination with the gas-electric Boll Weevil train epitomizes his appreciation for the freedom of movement between the worlds of Uptown and Downtown. The collection ends with a homecoming to Charleston by our narrator, then a young man in his early twenties, as his inbound train is greeted by familiar vistas as well as by views he had never encountered before. This is the city Rubin called home, where there were always surprising discoveries to be found, both in the burgeoning newness of Uptown and the storied legacies of old Downtown.

Uptown/Downtown in Old Charleston: Sketches and Stories

Rubin, Louis D., Jr.

Genre Fiction

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