Background
Wyatt-Brown, Bertram was born on March 19, 1932 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States. Son of Hunter and Laura Hibbler (Little) Wyatt-Brown.
(Extending his investigation into the ethical life of the ...)
Extending his investigation into the ethical life of the white American South beyond what he wrote in Southern Honor (1982), Bertram Wyatt-Brown explores three major themes in southern history: the political aspects of the South's code of honor, the increasing prominence of Protestant faith in white southerners' lives, and the devastating impact of war, defeat, and an angry loss of confidence during the post-Civil War era. This eloquent and richly textured study first demonstrates the psychological complexity of race relations, drawing new and provocative comparisons between American slave oppression and the Nazi concentration camp experience. The author then reveals how the rhetoric and rituals of honor affected the Revolutionary generation and--through a study of Andrew Jackson, dueling, and other demonstrations of manhood--how early American politicians won or lost popularity. In perhaps the most subtle and intriguing section of the book, he discloses the interconnections of honor and religious belief and practice. Finally, exploring the effects of war and defeat on former Confederates, Wyatt-Brown suggests that the rise of violent racism following the Civil War had significant links to the shame of military defeat and the spurious invocation of religious convictions.
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(The novels of Walker Percy--The Moviegoer, Lancelot, The ...)
The novels of Walker Percy--The Moviegoer, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome to name a few--have left a permanent mark on twentieth-century Southern fiction; yet the history of the Percy family in America matches anything, perhaps, that he could have created. Two centuries of wealth, literary accomplishment, political leadership, depression, and sometimes suicide established a fascinating legacy that lies behind Walker Percy's acclaimed prose and profound insight into the human condition. In The House of Percy, Bertram Wyatt-Brown masterfully interprets the life of this gifted family, drawing out the twin themes of an inherited inclination to despondency and an abiding sense of honor. The Percy family roots in Mississippi and Louisiana go back to "Don Carlos" Percy, an eighteenth-century soldier of fortune who amassed a large estate but fell victim to mental disorder and suicide. Wyatt-Brown traces the Percys through the slaveholding heyday of antebellum Natchez, the ravages of the Civil War (which produced the heroic Colonel William Alexander Percy, the "Gray Eagle"), and a return to prominence in the Mississippi Delta after Reconstruction. In addition, the author recovers the tragic lives and literary achievements of several Percy-related women, including Sarah Dorsey, a popular post-Civil War novelist who horrified her relatives by befriending Jefferson Davis--a married man--and bequeathing to him her plantation home, Beauvoir, along with her entire fortune. Wyatt-Brown then chronicles the life of Senator LeRoy Percy, whose climactic re-election loss in 1911 to a racist demagogue deply stung the family pride, but inspired his bold defiance to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. The author goes on to tell the poignant story of poet and war hero Will Percy, the Senator's son. The weight of this family narrative found expression in Will Percy's memoirs, Lanterns on the Levee--and in the works of Walker Percy, who was reared in his cousin Will's Greenville home after the suicidal death of Walker's father and his mother's drowning. As the biography of a powerful dynasty, steeped in Sou8thern traditions and claims to kinship with English nobility, The House of Percy shows the interrelationship of legend, depression, and grand achievement. Written by a leading scholar of the South, it weaves together intensive research and thoughtful insights into a riveting, unforgettable story.
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(A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book A...)
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, hailed in The Washington Post as "a work of enormous imagination and enterprise" and in The New York Times as "an important, original book," Southern Honor revolutionized our understanding of the antebellum South, revealing how Southern men adopted an ancient honor code that shaped their society from top to bottom. Using legal documents, letters, diaries, and newspaper columns, Wyatt-Brown offers fascinating examples to illuminate the dynamics of Southern life throughout the antebellum period. He describes how Southern whites, living chiefly in small, rural, agrarian surroundings, in which everyone knew everyone else, established the local hierarchy of kinfolk and neighbors according to their individual and familial reputation. By claiming honor and dreading shame, they controlled their slaves, ruled their households, established the social rankings of themselves, kinfolk, and neighbors, and responded ferociously against perceived threats. The shamed and shameless sometimes suffered grievously for defying community norms. Wyatt-Brown further explains how a Southern elite refined the ethic. Learning, gentlemanly behavior, and deliberate rather than reckless resort to arms softened the cruder form, which the author calls "primal honor." In either case, honor required men to demonstrate their prowess and engage in fierce defense of individual, family, community, and regional reputation by duel, physical encounter, or war. Subordination of African-Americans was uppermost in this Southern ethic. Any threat, whether from the slaves themselves or from outside agitation, had to be met forcefully. Slavery was the root cause of the Civil War, but, according to Wyatt-Brown, honor pulled the trigger. Featuring a new introduction by the author, this anniversary edition of a classic work offers readers a compelling view of Southern culture before the Civil War.
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(Hailed as a classic by reviewers and historians, Bertram ...)
Hailed as a classic by reviewers and historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor now appears in abridged form under the title Honor and Violence in the Old South. Winner of a Phi Alpha Theta Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, this is the first major reinterpretation of Southern life and custom since W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South. It explores the meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites--both slaveholders and non-slaveholders--applied it to their lives. Wyatt-Brown argues persuasively that Southern ethical habits and traditions are the basis of regional distinctiveness and helped to perpetuate and justify the South's most cherised peculiarity: the institution of slavery. Using both literature and anthropology in innovative ways, Wyatt-Brown shows how honor affected family loyalty and community defensiveness. He also explains why, though it preceded and outlasted the demise of slavery, honor thrived on race oppression and was manifested in such violent acts as rape, lynching, and slave discipline. The work begins with a study of Hawthorne's famous story of a tar-and-feathering, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," and ends with an authentic lynching, an absorbing and chilling example of a public shaming ritual. Between these studies of fictional and historical violence, Wyatt-Brown deals with such wide-ranging topics as childbearing, marital patterns, gentility, legal traditions, duelling, hospitality, slave discipline, lynch-law, and insurrectionary panic--all of which were matters that gave white Southerners a special sense of themselves.
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( The Percys, one the most distinguished families in the ...)
The Percys, one the most distinguished families in the South, are notable not only for their prominence in the political and economic development of the Mississippi Delta but also for their literary creativity. In The Literary Percys, noted historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown examines the role of gender and family history in the writings of this exceptional lineage. Few families in American can claim so many gifted writers as the Percys. The best-known among them are novelist Walker Percy, who died in 1990, and his cousin and guardian, William Alexander Percy, poet and author of the classic memoir Lanterns on the Levee. In researching the family's history, however, Wyatt-Brown discovered that Walker and Will were not the first in the family to take up the pen. In the nineteenth century, four Percy-related women--Eleanor Percy Ware Lee, Catherine Ann Ware Warfield, Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, and Kate Ferguson--published a total of eighteen works, chiefly novels, but also books of poetry and a biography. Wyatt-Brown examines these achievements in the context of contemporary Delta society and in light of these writers' lives within a family of powerful planters and lawyers. Through these four women he also draws connections between the Percys' literary inclinations and the family's tendency toward melancholy--a disorder with which Walker Percy was burdened throughout his life. In the twentieth century, Wyatt-Brown observes, the male authors--Will and Walker Percy--reflected on the ravages of modern life using a wider range of forms, from philosophical essay to memoir to science fiction. Curiously, in composing Lancelot (1977) Walker Percy chose the gothic form that his collateral ancestors had sometimes adopted, and fashioned a plot and villainous hero bearing uncanny resemblances to those of a bestseller by Catherine Warfield, published more than one hundred years earlier. Finally, Wyatt-Brown explores Walker Percy's use of a purely male genre--namely, the mock-heroic--and how it reflected his personal and familial concerns. The Literary Percys uncovers an impressive family history and offers fascinating details about southern literary life.
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(The role of melancholy and alienation in the evolution of...)
The role of melancholy and alienation in the evolution of nineteenth-century southern letters From Edgar Allan Poe's "dark forebodings" to Kate Chopin's lifelong struggle with sorrow and loss, depression has shadowed southern letters. This beautifully realized study explores the defining role of melancholy in southern literature from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when it evolved into modernist alienation. While creativity and depression have been linked throughout Western history, Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that nineteenth-century southern culture was hospitable to a distinctive melancholy that impelled literary production. Deeply marked by high death rates, social dread, and bitter defeat, white southerners imposed a climate of parochial pride, stifling conventions of masculinity, social condescension, and mistrust of intellectualism. Many writers experienced a conscious or unconscious alienation from the prevailing social currents. And they expressed emotional turmoil in and through their writing. HEARTS OF DARKNESS develops original insights into the lives and creative impulses of both major and more obscure writers. Discussing individuals as diverse as William Gilmore Simms, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Sidney Lanier, and Ellen Glasgow, Wyatt-Brown identifies a close association between creativity and psychological distress. This connection helps to explain southern literary engrossment with defeat and violence--together with a disposition for the romantic, gothic, and grotesque styles well before William Faulkner and the male Southern Renaissance. Wyatt-Brown also finds that the first authors to break away from the sentimental modes to explore new psychological terrain were women whose depression ironically furnished them with critical dispassion. HEARTS OF DARKNESS is a major reinterpretation of the South's fertile literary culture. The work intensifies our regard for both southern writers and the fruits of pen and paper. Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History
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Wyatt-Brown, Bertram was born on March 19, 1932 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States. Son of Hunter and Laura Hibbler (Little) Wyatt-Brown.
He studied the role of honor in southern society, in all classes, and wrote a family study of the Percy Family, including its twentieth-century authors William Alexander Percy and Walker Percy. Wyatt-Brown earned his Doctor of Philosophy in history at Johns Hopkins University in 1963, having worked under the supervision of C. Vann Woodward, the noted historian of the South.
He was the Richard J. Milbauer Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, where he taught from 1983-2004. He also taught at Case Western University for nearly two decades. Following his high school education, Wyatt-Brown matriculated at the University of the South in Tennessee, earning his Bachelor of Arts in 1953.
He joined the Armed Services and served from 1953 to 1955, becoming a lieutenant junior grade in the Naval Reserve.
After his military service, he received a second Bachelor of Arts degree from King"s College at Cambridge University in 1957. Wyatt-Brown was the Richard J. Milbauer Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, where he taught from 1983-2004, and Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University.
He previously taught at Colorado State University, University of Colorado, and Case Western Reserve University (1966-1983), with special appointments to University of Wisconsin, University of Richmond, and the College of William and Mary. During his career, Wyatt-Brown wrote ten books, and more than 90 articles, forewords, and essays, and nearly 150 book reviews and essay reviews.
He served on the Editorial Advisory Board for Ohio History, the scholarly journal of the Ohio Historical Society, 1978-1986.
And was Series editor of the Louisiana State Press" Southern Biography Series. He is a past president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (1994), the Saint George Tucker Society (1998-1999), and the Southern Historical Association (2000-2001). At the time of his death, he was writing Honor and America"s Wars: From the Revolution to Iraq.
In 1983 Wyatt-Brown was a history finalist for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his best-known work, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982), described as a study of the "meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites -- both slaveholders and non-slaveholders -- applied it to their lives.".
(Extending his investigation into the ethical life of the ...)
(A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book A...)
(The novels of Walker Percy--The Moviegoer, Lancelot, The ...)
(The role of melancholy and alienation in the evolution of...)
( The Percys, one the most distinguished families in the ...)
(Hailed as a classic by reviewers and historians, Bertram ...)
(One of a series of educational paperbacks that follow one...)
(Book by Wyatt-Brown, Bertram)
(Book by Wyatt-Brown, Bertram)
Member of Society for History Early American Republic (president 1994-1995), Southern History Association (executive council since 1994, vice president 1999—2000, president 2000-2001, Ramsdell award 1971), Society of America Historians, Organizations American Historians (executive council 1990-1993), St. George Tucker Society (president 1998—2000), Phi Alpha Theta (History prize 1983), Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Anne Jewett Marbury, June 30, 1962. Children: Laura (deceased), Natalie.