Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

Louis Decimus Rubin Jr. (November 19, 1923 – November 16, 2013) was a noted American literary critic, writer, teacher, and publisher. He is credited with helping to establish Southern literature as a recognized area of study within the field of American literature, as well as serving as a teacher and mentor for writers at Hollins College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill;

Early life and education The Rubins lived at 2 North Allan Park, Charleston, South Carolina during the 1920s.

Childhood Louis D. Rubin Jr. was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the eldest of the three children of Louis D. Rubin Sr. and Jeanette Weinstein Rubin. His father, who later became well known in Virginia as an amateur weather forecaster and published a book on weather forecasting, owned an electrical supply business. that brought the contrasts between Charleston's insularity and modern America to his attention.

Military service, journalism, and literary criticism Rubin studied for two years at the College of Charleston, then was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II; he studied Italian at Yale University as part of the Army Specialized Training Program, then worked as a journalist for the base newspaper at Fort Benning. After the war he received a B.A. from the University of Richmond in 1946, and an M.A. and Ph.D from the Johns Hopkins University in 1949 and 1954, respectively. He brought noted authors such as Eudora Welty, Howard Nemerov and William Golding to campus as writers-in-residence, founded the Hollins Critic literary journal, and in 1960 established a co-ed graduate-level creative writing program at the women's college. Despite shaky finances, the company successfully introduced a number of new writers, most of whom were Southern fiction writers; these included Rubin's former students Jill McCorkle and Kaye Gibbons, as well as Clyde Edgerton, Dori Sanders, and Larry Brown. The company was acquired in 1989 by Workman Publishing and has gone on to publish a number of best-selling books. Rubin stayed on for two years as its chief editor and publisher, then retired from publishing in 1991, though he continued to edit some books for Algonquin. He was named to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 1997.

Notable works

Literary history and criticism

Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South (coedited with Robert D. Jacobs, 1953) Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth (1955) No Place on Earth: Ellen Glasgow, James Branch Cabell, and Richmond-in-Virginia (1959) The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South (1963) The Curious Death of the Novel: Essays in American Literature (1967) The Teller in the Tale (1967) George W. Cable: The Life and Times of a Southern Heretic (1969) A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (editor, 1969) The Writer in the South (1972) Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Interpretation (1974) William Elliott Shoots a Bear: Essays on the Southern Literary Imagination (1976) The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets and the South (1978) The American South: Portrait of a Culture (editor, 1980) A Gallery of Southerners (1982) The History of Southern Literature (editor, 1985) The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (1989) The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree: A Literary Gallimaufry (1991) Babe Ruth's Ghost: And Other Historical and Literary Speculations (1996) Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog: On Writers and Writing (2005)

History, memoir, and short fiction

Virginia: A Bicentennial History (1977) The Boll Weevil and the Triple Play (1979) Before the Game (1988) Small Craft Advisory: A Book about the Building of a Boat (1991) Seaports of the South: A Journey (1998) A Memory of Trains: The Boll Weevil and Others (2000) An Honorable Estate: My Time in the Working Press (2001) My Father's People: A Family of Southern Jews (2002) The Summer the Archduke Died: On Wars and Warriors (2008) Uptown and Downtown in Old Charleston: Sketches and Stories (2010)

Anthologies and writing instruction

The Literary South (1979) The Algonquin Literary Quiz Book (with Julia Randall and Jerry Leith Mills, 1990) A Writer's Companion (with Jerry Leith Mills, 1995)

Novels

The Golden Weather (1961) Surfaces of a Diamond (1981) The Heat of the Sun (1995)