Fred Hobson is a professor of American literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has written several books about the South, among them Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, a recipient of the Jules F. Landry Award, and South-Watching: Selected Essays of Gerald W. Johnson, which won the Lillian Smith Award. He is co-editor of the last of Mencken's papers opened to the public, published in Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work: A Memoir by H. L. Mencken, available from Johns Hopkins.