Paul Hemphill

Paul Hemphill

1936–2009

Though Paul Hemphill’s 15 books rarely reached best-seller lists, he was acclaimed as a writer who brought to life small-time sports, evangelism, hard drinking, and other fixtures of Southern culture. “I’m the son of a Birmingham trucker,” he once said, “and I have no business—or interest—in writing about any other part of the country.”

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As a young man in Alabama, “Hemphill dreamed of playing baseball, but he washed out in the first days of spring training for the Graceville Oilers, a Class D Florida team,” said The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Instead, he ended up at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, which became Auburn Uni­versity.” After graduating, he worked for various Atlanta papers and came to specialize in human-interest columns that earned him the nickname “the Jimmy Breslin of the South.” He left newspapers in 1970, after the publication of The Nashville Sound, about the country music scene. It sold 75,000 hardcover copies, but “none of his subsequent work did as well.”

Whatever the subject, said The Washington Post, Hemphill brought a “lyrical and sensitive” touch to “the world of the blue-collar South, showing a great knack for capturing its speech, sorrows, and pathos.” His 1979 novel Long Gone was a colorful yarn about a fictional minor league ball team called the Tampico Stogies; in The Ballad of Little River (2000), he told the true tale of “aimless, disillusioned white youths who went to prison for setting fire to a black church.” Perhaps his most heartfelt work was his 1993 memoir Leaving Birmingham, “which exposed his father’s racist leanings and showed little mercy for the city’s pieties.”

Hemphill, who died of cancer, is survived by his second wife and four children.