Jack Pendarvis News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> anthony: some time ago something crawled, or slithered, or grew like a fungus. something that started small, got bigger, lurched like a swamp thing out of the mud and moist earth and humid nights of the delta. then, it took over the world. so next time some smart ass foreigner, horrified by our latest ham-fisted foreign policy blunder wonders out loud, "what good is america?" well, you can always pipe up that the blues, rock 'n' roll, r&b, and soul all came out of this place -- one state -- mississippi. ♪ i took a walk through this beautiful world ♪ ♪ felt the cool rain on m...

This place one state mississippi. I took a walk through this beautiful world felt the cool rain on my shoulder found something good in this beautiful world i felt the rain getting colder sha la la la la sha la la la la la sha la la la la sha la la la la la la geno right now were in the middle of downtown jackson. Farish street. Anthony it is a street with a lot of history. What did it used to be like back in the day . Geno the street was packed with folks. Folks all over, they had their own restaurants, grocery stores, juke joints. I mean everything happened on farish street that happened in j...

Very much like this place, in mississippi. >> bill griffith: this is where faulkner started his writing career in this room, here. >> anthony: for the past ten years, bill griffith has been curator at william faulkner's estate. >> bill griffith: he added this room on after he won the nobel prize. and on the wall here is an outline of one of his novels. >> jack pendarvis: yeah, that was his greatest book. >> bill griffith: yeah, faulkner thought this was his masterpiece. >> anthony: jack pendarvis is the author of "your body is changing," "the mysterious secret of the valuable treasure," and "a...

Wrote extensively about the post-civil war south. he was the first author to do so at a time when most writers were writing about anything but. >> bill griffith: he always said that he wrote about a south torn between itself. torn between the old ways, the old traditional ways, and modern development. he said he was gonna break the antebellum code. >> anthony: right. >> bill griffith: and he did. >> anthony: but -- >> bill griffith: he did, and yet -- he had those hobbies and interests that were definitely of a gentry class and a gentry nature. >> jack pendarvis: his portrait and his horse -- ...

About being right or wrong, he said any sane, sober southerner knows that it's wrong. it's about wanting to change or not. but people don't want to give up power. fear is still alive and well in mississippi. i think racism is one of those great things in the world that you'll never solve and that's why faulkner wrote about it. >> anthony: writers, as i know from looking in my own dark heart, are generally terrible people. put ten of them together and it's like putting your head in a bag full of snakes. i meet a bunch of them above in city grocery, john currence's place on the square. there's t...