A Southern Life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916-1981.

It is probably no mere coincidence that the image of the University of North Carolina as a bastion of liberalism in the reactionary South first gained wide currency in the 1920s, when Paul Green started teaching on the Chapel Hill campus. A Tarheel country boy who graduated from UNC and then spent virtually all of his long and productive professional life there, Green was that most rare and admirable of white Southerners, a person who from an early age understood and accepted the common humanity of the species.

As a playwright, Green was enormously prolific over a span of nearly six decades. One of his earliest dramas, In Abraham's Bosom, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1927, and he went on to write scores of other compositions, among them an adaptation of Richard Wright's novel Native Son for the Broadway stage. Green is probably best remembered for sixteen symphonic dramas" celebrating the history and traditions of an America intently marching, as he saw it, on a progressive path to its destiny. Several of these dramas were still being staged in outdoor theaters from Florida to Texas when Paul Green died in 1981.

Green was a great talker and letterwriter, too; Laurence G. Avery's admirably meticulous and painstaking effort to distill the essence of the expansive Carolinian's voluminous correspondence shows that. If the dramatist's stage productions hadn't made clear his liberal sensibilities, his deeply felt and eloquently expressed social ideals would have done as well, even better. He was passionate in his advocacy of minority rights, organized labor, civil liberties, educational and political reforms; he was also an insistent and consistent foe of capital punishment.

As this book clearly demonstrates, collections of letters can tell us a great deal about the character and personality of their writers. Conversely, they may not be nearly as revealing of the larger history of their place and time. The Green letters are a case in point. He was probably the earliest, if not the most active, of the UNC liberals of the 1920s and 1930s, including President Frank Porter Graham, university press director W.T. Couch, sociologists Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson. But this correspondence offers little on his relationship with those others, or on UNC's decreasingly liberal posture in the volatile post-World War II era. That aside, it is still satisfying to read Paul Green's outgoing mail and get heavy doses of spontaneity from a man who loved words and life and liberty, and tried his best to spread them around.