Originally published in 1941, Cottonmouth is an Alabama novel like no other in its evocation of the sights, sounds, and smells of the city of Mobile, and in its depiction of a young boy growing up in the Deep South during the early 20th century. Highly autobiographical, the book is, in a real sense, two stories in one: the biography of a boy from his earliest memories through high school, and the life of a city in the years between the two world wars. In his introduction to this reprint within The Library of Alabama Classics, Benjamin B. Williams presents the author, Julian...