For immediate use

Nov. 25, 1997 -- No. 887

LSU Press reissues story collection by Doris Betts

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC-CH News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Louisiana State University Press in Baton Rouge has published a paperback book by novelist Doris Betts, Alumni Distinguished professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as part of its Voices of the South series.

Betts wrote “The Gentle Insurrection,” a collection of 12 stories, while a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, then called Woman's College. She wrote them for classes taught by authors Peter Taylor and Frances Gray Patton of Durham.

Already appearing in the LSU series is a collection of her later stories, “The Astronomer and Other Stories.”

Betts is the author of “The Sharp Teeth of Love,” “Souls Raised from the Dead,” “Heading West,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories,” “The River to Pickle Beach,” “The Scarlet Thread” and “Tall Houses in Winter.”

She is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Medal of Merit for the Short Story and many other awards.

When the reissued book first appeared in 1954, a New York Times reviewer wrote, “Betts proves herself to be already a master of the short story form and a candidate for an important position among those concerned with serious and perceptive reporting of the Southern small town and Southern people.”

Other writers represented in the Voices of the South series include Erskine Caldwell, Mac Hyman, Willie Morris, Lee Smith, Max Steele, Allen Tate, Peter Taylor and Robert Penn Warren.

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Note: Betts can be reached at (919) 962-4006.

Contact: David Williamson