When you reach September: An editor's West Florida essays and other episodic echoes

Evoking images of West Florida's Chipola River Country and other regions from Pensacola to Tallahassee, Jesse Earle Bowden's " Song of Many Septembers" in this expanded Florida Classic Edition continues the nostalgic anthem that began with his popular 1979 memoir, Always the Rivers Flow - now too in a Florida Classic Edition. He expanded the theme with his best-selling West Florida novel, Look and Tremble, and his later Southern story collection, Embrace an Autumnal Heart. Lyrically portraying a Southern boyhood of the 1930's and 1940's, Bowden accents this edition with four fictional stories, " Ruby's Café," "Six Bushels of Corn," "Atchafalaya" and "The Worm Grunters." Memorable Pensacola News Journal columns and features trace the changing seasons, holidays, family gatherings, politics, vote-buying, country boy sports and humorous small-town stories. He profiles Southern novelists William Faulkner and Thomas Clayton Wolfe, legendary Florida Governor Fuller Warren and Southern humorist/philosopher Brother Dave Gardner; brings alive Civil War battles Shiloh and Gettysburg, Old South Charleston and Savannah, and wilderness Wakulla Springs, Dead Lakes and Okefenokee Swamp; salutes Don Sutton and his major league Hall of Fame destiny, and rides the Gulf Wind into railroading history. With many other sentimental journeys and many evocative drawings, Bowden again awakens the soul and spirit of the past colliding with the future in his native West Florida.