The Wrecking Crew

Morris, King, and Frady were journalists, all born in the South, who came of age in the 1950’s and began their careers on Southern daily newspapers. John Grammer traces how they came together during Morris’s brief but momentous editorship of Harper’s magazine from 1967 to 1971, with King and Frady among his most important contributors. The owners of the magazine called these young southerners “the wrecking crew” because of their raucous, often alcohol-fueled irreverence toward many conventions but particularly toward those of journalism. Like such contemporaries as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion, they tested the border between fiction and journalism with deeply reported articles that read like short stories. They were led to these innovations in part by their admiration for literary elders like William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Thomas Wolfe. But they put this literary inheritance to a new purpose when, as young reporters, they encountered the Civil Rights Movement in the South. As “who-what-when-where” journalism proved inadequate to the unique pressures of the moment, they improvised a literary method and created an important but heretofore under-recognized chapter in the literary history of the South.