Robert Chrisman (May 28, 1937 – March 10, 2013) was a poet, scholar, and founding editor and publisher of The Black Scholar (TBS). Chrisman and the internationally acclaimed TBS "occupied the vanguard of the struggle for recognition of Black Studies as a serious academic endeavor."
James Wesley Silver (June 28, 1907 – July 25, 1988) was a history professor and author. He wrote Mississippi: The Closed Society. He was a professor at the University of Mississippi, then University of Notre Dame, and finally at the University of South Florida. He was targeted for firing despite his tenure at Ole Miss because of his support for civil rights.When rioting erupted on the Ole Miss campus after James Meredith became the University of Mississippi's first African-American student and federal troops moved in to keep order, Silver befriended Meredith. In a speech to the Southern Historical Association in the Fall of 1963, he analyzed the violence with which Mississippi was resisting desegregation. Mississippi was, he said, "a closed society" -- "totalitarian," "monolithic," "corrupt." The speech received widespread media coverage, and he expanded his analysis in a book, Mississippi: The Closed Society (1964). His advocacy of racial change had subjected him to hostility in Mississippi and even an attempt by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission to have him fired. That effort failed, but Silver took a job teaching at University of Notre Dame in Indiana.He taught at Notre Dame from 1965 until 1969. He left Notre Dame to teach history at the University of South Florida until he retired in 1982.He corresponded with the president of Tougaloo College A. D. Beittel.Photographer Martin J. Dain took photographs of him in Oxford, Mississippi. Silver was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Julian Hawthorne (June 22, 1846 – July 14, 1934) was an American writer and journalist, the son of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. He wrote numerous poems, novels, short stories, mysteries and detective fiction, essays, travel books, biographies, and histories.
Harry Middleton (December 28, 1949 – July 28, 1993) was a southern American nature writer, most noted for his book The Earth is Enough.
Madison Julius Cawein (March 23, 1865 – December 8, 1914) was a poet from Louisville, Kentucky.
Chalmers Ashby Johnson (August 6, 1931 – November 20, 2010) was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean War, was a consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973 and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972. He was also president and co-founder with Steven Clemons of the Japan Policy Research Institute (now based at the University of San Francisco), an organization that promotes public education about Japan and Asia.Johnson wrote numerous books, including three examinations of the consequences of what he called the "American Empire": Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis; The Last Days of the American Republic. A former Cold Warrior, he notably stated, "A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship."
Reginald Shepherd (April 10, 1963 – September 10, 2008) was an American poet, born in New York City and raised in the Bronx. He died of cancer in Pensacola, Florida, in 2008.
Melville Davisson Post (April 19, 1869 – June 23, 1930) was an American writer, born in Harrison County, West Virginia. Although his name is not immediately familiar to those outside of specialist circles, many of his collections are still in print, and many collections of detective fiction include works by him. Post's best-known character is the mystery solving, justice dispensing West Virginian backwoodsman, Uncle Abner. The 22 Uncle Abner tales, written between 1911 and 1928, have been called some of "the finest mysteries ever written".Post's other recurring characters include the lawyers Randolph Mason and Colonel Braxton, and the detectives Sir Henry Marquis and Monsieur Jonquelle. His total output was approximately 230 titles, including several non-crime novels.
Hilary Masters (February 3, 1928 in Kansas City, Missouri – June 14, 2015 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was an American novelist, the son of poet Edgar Lee Masters, and Ellen Frances Coyne Masters. He attended Davidson College from 1944 to 1946, then served in the U.S. Navy from 1946 to 1947 as a naval correspondent. He completed his BA at Brown University in 1952.Masters began his writing career after graduation in New York City with Bennett & Pleasant, press agents for concert and dance artists. Next he worked independently as a theatrical press agent for Off Broadway and summer theaters from 1953 to 1956. He then moved into journalism with the Hyde Park Record, in Hyde Park, New York from 1956 to 1959. In the 1960s he was a Democratic candidate for New York's 100th Assembly District. He also worked as a freelance photographer for Image Bank and exhibits.
He taught writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Drake University, Clark University, Ohio University, and the University of Denver. From 1983 until his death 32 years later he served as Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.Masters married Polly Jo McCulloch in 1955 (divorced, 1986); they had three children. In 1994 he married the writer Kathleen George. Masters resided in Pittsburgh's Mexican War Streets and died at home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
William Humphrey (June 18, 1924 – August 20, 1997) was an American novelist, memoirist, short story writer, and author of literary sporting and nature stories. His published works, while still available in French translation, largely have been out of print until recently. Home from the Hill and The Ordways are available from LSU Press. In 2015, Open Road Media published the complete works of William Humphrey in digital form.
Of significant interest to readers of Humphrey are Wakeful Anguish, A Literary Biography of William Humphrey by Ashby Bland Crowder as well as Far From Home, Selected Letters of William Humphrey edited by Crowder, both available from Louisiana State University Press.