UNTIDY PILGRIM

This classic coming-of-age novel, winner of the Lippincott FictionPrize for Young Novelists in 1954, is a deliberately comic portrayal of"Mobile madness," a malady specific to the Gulf Coast but recognizableby all. Eugene Walter's first novel is about a young man from a small centralAlabama town who goes south of the "salt line" to Mobile to work in a bankand study law.  As soon as this unnamed pilgrim arrives, he realizesthat--although he is still in Alabama—he has entered a separate physicalkingdom of banana trees and palm fronds, subtropical heat and humidity,old houses and lacy wrought-iron balconies. In the "land of clowns" andthe "kingdom of monkeys"—in the town that can claim the oldest Mardi Grasin America--there is no Puritan work ethic; the only ruling forces are thoseof chaos, craziness, and caprice. Such forces overtake the pilgrim, seducehim away from the beaten career path, and set him on a zigzag course throughlife. The Untidy Pilgrim celebrates the insularityas well as the eccentricity of southerners—and Mobilians, in particular—inthe mid-20th century. Cut off from the national mainstream, they are portrayedas devoid of that particularly American angst over what to "do" and accomplishwith one's life, and indulge instead in art, music, cooking, nature, andlove.  In this novel Walter eschews the "gloom and doom" southernliterary tradition established by Faulkner, Capote, and McCullers to illuminatethe joyous quirkiness of human existence. In 1954 this refreshing approach to the southernscene garnered the praise of the judges for that year's Lippincott FictionPrize, Jacques Barzun, Diana Trilling, and Bernard DeVoto. This reissueof the paperback in The University of Alabama Press's Deep South Booksseries assures yet another generation the delight of Eugene Walter's award-winningromp through Mobile.