Deer Creek Drive

A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

Deer Creek Drive
Beverly Lowry
RRP:
NZ$ 65.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 52.00
Hardback
h235 x 159mm - 336pg
2 Aug 2022 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9780525657231
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
The stunning chronicle of a murder that rocked the Mississippi Delta and forever shaped one author' s life and perception of home. In 1948, in the most stubbornly Dixiefied corner of the Jim Crow south, society matron Idella Thompson was viciously murdered in her own home- stabbed at least 150 times and left facedown in one of the bathrooms. Her daughter, Ruth Dickins, was the only other person in the house. She told authorities a Black man she didn' t recognize had fled the scene, but no evidence of the man' s presence was uncovered. When Dickins herself was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the community exploded. Petitions pleading for her release were drafted, signed, and circulated, and after only six years, the governor of Mississippi granted Ruth Dickins an indefinite suspension of her sentence and she was set free. In Deer Creek Drive, Beverly Lowry-who was ten at the time of the murder and lived mere miles from the Thompsons' home-tells a story of white privilege that still has ramifications today, and reflects on the brutal crime, its aftermath, and the ways it clarified her own upbringing in Mississippi.
"The Mississippi Delta in the 1940s, a gruesome murder mystery, family dramas that conjure Faulkner and Welty-this is a book that only Beverly Lowry, a daughter of the Delta, could bring to the world now. At once a thriller, a memoir and a portrait of a bygone South, Deer Creek Drive is a stunning valedictory from one of the region' s greatest living writers. " -Bryan Burrough, co-author of Barbarians at the Gate and Forget the Alamo "Beverly Lowry writes about some very grave things in Deer Creek Drive: matricide, deceit, greed, forbidden love, fury, bad luck and the world' s casual meanness. Yet with pure elan, she writes it truly, and with such astonishing wit and savvy that I couldn' t stop reading. " -Richard Ford "Like the author of Deer Creek Drive, I grew up only a few miles from where the events chronicled in these pages occurred. Ruth Dickins was a figure who haunted my childhood, one around whom an entire mythological system had sprung up. In this gripping and beautifully written book, Beverly Lowry strips away that mythology to reveal it for what it was-and, perhaps more importantly, for what it remains to this day. This is the finest piece of literature I' ve ever read about the mysterious place called the Mississippi Delta. " -Steve Yarbrough, author of Stay Gone Days "Beverly Lowry' s Deer Creek Drive is a revelation, shedding much needed light not only on the politics of race in the South but on the additional importance of class and social connections and power to the social dynamic. Lowry skillfully interweaves her own coming of age story with the sensational happenings in nearby Leland and shows them as illustrating, in microcosm, the changes that were about to explode in a changing South. A fascinating, compelling read. I could not put it down. " -Deborah Johnson, author of The Secret of Magic, winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction
BEVERLY LOWRY is the author of six novels and four previous works of nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Mississippi Review, Granta, and many other publications. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Austin, Texas.
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9780525657231
Published: 2 Aug 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: Alfred A Knopf
Publisher: Alfred A Knopf
Format: Hardback
Height: 235mm
Width: 159mm
Pages: 336

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