This is the South, "a culture of Dog," as Clyde Edgerton puts it in his introduction, and this is the Southern dog; a panoply of working dos, mutts, hounds, and lapdogs who, from time to time, wandered into great Southern literature and made themselves at home. Here are William Faulkner's brave feists and Reynolds Price's wriggling hounds and Elizabeth Spencer's proud curs. SOUTHERN DOGS & THEIR PEOPLE celebrates the dogged good humor of both an animal and a culture.
Photographer P.S. Davis has been taking photographs of dogs around her home of Greenville, Alabama, for many years. With tenderness and flinty-eyed wit, a clear sense of the perfect and the absurd, Davis has documented a way of life. Coupled with quotations selected by editor Roberta Gamble, this book is an elegant meditation on what Southerners think of their dogs ad - not surprisingly - what they think of themselves.
