Editor, novelist, essayist, teacher and publisher Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has had an immeasurable effect on a generation of North Carolina writers and readers. The teacher whose former students include such noted Southern writers as Clyde Edgerton, Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, John Barth and Kaye Gibbons is himself a respected writer of literary criticism, essays, history, biographies and novels. He readily acknowledges his debt to the students he has taught over the years. "I can't very well work in a vacuum," he once told a reporter. "I'm a teacher. I can't write something until I actually deal with it with my students."

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1923, Louis Rubin spent two years at the College of Charleston and received his B.A. in history from the University of Richmond after serving in the United States Army during World War II. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. In 1953, while still at Johns Hopkins, he co-edited his first book, Southern Renascence, a work which established him as a major figure in Southern literature, and in 1955 published Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth. He has continued to write prolifically, publishing forty books since those first two. Before settling on an academic career, Louis Rubin worked as a journalist for newspapers and the Associated Press in Hackensack, New Jersey; Wilmington, Delaware; Baltimore; and Staunton and Richmond in Virginia. He writes two hours a day and credits this newspaper background with his ability to produce rapidly. "On a newspaper you do the best you can and you get it out," he has said. "You don't hold it forever. It's a matter of discipline. I've found it very valuable."

Louis Rubin came to the University of North Carolina in 1967, following two years at the University of Pennsylvania and ten at Hollins College in Virginia, where he chaired the English department for several years. He remained on UNC's English faculty for twenty-two years, retiring from teaching in 1989 as University Distinguished Professor of English, now Emeritus. He left teaching in order to devote his energies full time to Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. In 1983, Rubin founded the press, recognizing the difficulties talented young writers have encountered in getting published, saying that he saw no reason why there should not be a "good full-fledged nationally-oriented trade publishing house in the South" to showcase Southern writers.

Louis Rubin is married to the former Eva Redfield, who teaches political science at North Carolina State University. They have two sons, Robert Alden and William Louis. Rubin is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Sewanee Review, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Fellowships; the Oliver Max Gardner Award; the Mayflower Award; the Distinguished Virginian Award; and honorary degrees from the University of Richmond, the College of Charleston and Clemson University. He received the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1992 and, most recently, the R. Hunt Parker Memorial Award for lifetime contributions to the literary heritage of North Carolina. His interests outside of literature include fishing, classical music and baseball. "He became something of a literary hero to me even before I met him," declares Clyde Edgerton. "After I met him, I respected him even more."

Excerpt from The Boll Weevil, the Iron Horse and the End of the Line
from A Gallery of Southerners
Louisiana State University Press, 1982

...[I]f [nostalgia] were all there was to the southern literary imagination as it views the past, there would be little point in paying much heed to it. For the truth is that...just as there was at no time an absolute, unchanging, permanent form to the life of the Carolina low country, but instead at all times change and alteration, so my own memories of places, people, institutions, and artifacts of my own childhood and young manhood are composed not of fixity and diuturnity but of elements that were very much caught up in change, however they may have once seemed immutable to me. I had thought of the little Boll Weevil train as fixed and determined in its arrivals and departures at the Seaboard station. But the railroad crew that operated it reported that it had constantly broken down and been behind schedule, and what it meant for the agricultural life of the low country had been mobility, change, the coming of the city to the sea islands and the movement of the black folk to the city. When during the war I had caught sight of the Boll Weevil late one winter night in North Carolina, and had felt so powerfully that it belonged not there on the unfamiliar siding but to summer afternoons at the stucco station in Charleston, I had been facile. It was not the little train, but myself, who was in what seemed to be the wrong place and wrong season. And what made the present time and place seem unsatisfactory was that I was attributing a greater emotional importance, a more self-sufficient identity and a freedom from contingency, to the earlier experience. Whereas the truth was that only because of the later experience—because I saw the little train in Hamlet that night—was the earlier experience made to seem so important, so intense, to seem, in short, so very real. In actuality the authenticity of the experience, and its importance for me, lay neither in the isolated memory of the little train at College Park as such, which was an act of mere nostalgia, nor in my reencounter with the train at Hamlet, which because of its seeming inappropriateness was so pathetic. Rather, the authenticity and importance resided in the relation of the one to the other—in the profound vividness of the experience of time and change, a vividness that I myself, through my participation, was able to bring to it. And it has been just such vividness, but magnified and enriched many times through artistic genius, that has constituted the achievement of the best of the modern southern writers.

Babe Ruth's Ghost: And Other Historical and Literary Speculations. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996.

A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation. [Co-authored with Blyden Jackson]. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.

The Comic Imagination in American Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973.

The Curious Death of the Novel: Essays in American Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967.

The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

A Gallery of Southerners. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

George W. Cable: The Life and Times of a Southern Heretic. New York: Pegasus, 1969.

The Golden Weather. New York: Atheneum, 1961.

The Heat of the Sun. Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet Press, 1995.

The History of Southern Literature. [Editor]. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

The Idea of an American Novel. [Co-editor with John Rees Moore]. New York: T. Y. Crowell Co., 1961.

The Literary South. [Editor]. New York: Wiley, 1979.

The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree: A Literary Gallimaufry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.

Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South. [Co-edited with Robert D. Jacobs]. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953.

Surfaces of a Diamond. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955.

The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets and the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

William Elliott Shoots a Bear: Essays on the Southern Literary Imagination. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.

The Writer in the South: Studies in a Literary Community. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.

A Writer's Companion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Dr. Rubin has also been a frequent contributor to periodicals, including Georgia Historical Quarterly, Harper's, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Menckeniana, Mississippi Quarterly, Missouri Review, New Republic, North Carolina Historical Review, Sewanee Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Literary Journal, Southern Review, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Additional information can be found in:

King, Dean. "Publishing Good Books the Old-Fashioned Way." Connoisseur 219 (Jan. 1989): 44, 46-48.

Welty, Eudora. "Louis Rubin and the Making of Maps." Sewanee Review 97 (1989): 253-260.

Links to further information:

Louis Rubin's Papers at UNC