Tito Perdue

Tito Perdue (born 1938) is an American writer.

Life

Perdue was born in Sewell, Chile, while his father was working there for the Braden Copper Company. He was brought up in Anniston, Alabama, where he remained until he graduated as an alumnus of Indian Springs School. He attended Antioch College in Ohio for one year, before being expelled for cohabiting with his future wife, Judy Clark. They have a daughter, Melanie, two grandsons, and one great grandson.

Perdue continued his schooling at the University of Texas (B.A. – double major in English and History) and Indiana University (M.L.S. - Librarianship; M.A. – Modern European History), yet took several breaks from university life to visit New York City. After college, Perdue worked for some years as a librarian at the University of Iowa, and Iowa State University, before trying New York for a third time at the State University of New York at Binghamton. This experience lasted one and a half years; afterward, he accepted a job at Emory University in Atlanta. Within a year, at age 44, Perdue was fired, and decided to do what he had always most desired – write novels.

According to The New York Times Book Review, "[Perdue’s] language is vitriolic and hallucinatory, yet surprisingly lucid, producing a portrait both exceedingly strange and troubling," and in its review of The New Austerities, Publishers Weekly assigned to Perdue “magically evocative descriptive powers, pungent wit and iconoclastic point of view.” In the pages of Kirkus it was said Perdue "writes convincingly and iconoclastically… a marvelous black comedy that is sometimes as astringent as John Yount’s Toots in Solitude…” The New England Review of Books claims Perdue's novel Lee has "all of the makings of a classic." Jim Knipfel of the New York Press wrote, "Tito Perdue is, without question, one of the most important contemporary Southern writers we have — and should certainly be considered among the most important American writers of the early 21st century.”

Work

Perdue’s Sweet-Scented Manuscript was completed within a year of his "retirement," but was not published until 2004 when it was issued by Baskerville Pres). The novel is a love story that attempts to convey the impressions and yearnings of an 18-year-old boy, Leland Pefley, in his first exploration of the world; the novel is largely autobiographical. Perdue’s next novel, Lee, was about the same Leland Pefley, now an old man, bitter, hostile, angry at a world that no longer recognized the values and culture of the 1950s. He spewed venom at those who, surrounded by beauty, culture and literature, didn’t bother to avail themselves of it. Other works include The Node, Fields of Asphodel and The New Austerities, which depicts Lee Pefley’s flight from New York City back to his ancestral home in Alabama. That same year, Baskerville Press published Perdue’s Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture, a strange fictional account of an Alabama man, school teacher, rural route mail carrier, and farmer. This character, Benjamin, is loosely based on the life of Perdue’s maternal grandfather.

Political Opinions

Perdue has been described, by a book reviewer, as a "reactionary radical.".^[1]

Publications

• Lee – Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991; repr. Overlook Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-58567-872-3.
• The New Austerities – Peachtree Press, 1994. ISBN 978-1-56145-086-2.
• Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture – Baskerville Press, 1994. ISBN 978-1-880909-24-9.
• The Sweet-Scented Manuscript – Baskerville Press, 2004. ISBN 978-1-880909-68-3.
• Fields of Asphodel – Overlook Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-58567-871-6.
• The Node - Nine-Banded Books, 2011. ISBN 978-1-61658-351-4.
• Morning Crafts - Arktos, 2013. ISBN 978-1-907166-57-0.

References

External links

• Official Website
• Perdue's blog