Tobacco Sticks is the book that put me on the map. Small map though it may be. I was looking around for something to write after my first novel and I sat down with my father and asked him to tell me one more time about growing up in a big Southern family in the South. He unreeled the stories of his father who was a lawyer and managed Senator Byrds campaign in 1946 and how the families all got together on big porches and nobody ever moved and how he was raised by a Mammy who was large and drank all the time and became "sanctified" every Sunday.
And then he gave me a large scrapbook and in it was all the newspaper clippings from the Senatorial campaign. I took that and went to Virginia to interview the people who were still living who could tell me what it was like in 1946 Richmond Virginia. And then I came back home and tried to stitch a novel together. Seven years later a book was published called Tobacco Sticks. I had no great hopes for the book that is really the story of a lawyer who takes a case that puts him against his neighbors and friends. But then the reviews came in.
And they were good and my literary career began. I am not sure I will ever write a book like this one again that tackles unions, race, family, civil rights, and the slow change coming to the South. But maybe you only get one shot at the big book and this was mine.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
Tobacco Sticks
And then he gave me a large scrapbook and in it was all the newspaper clippings from the Senatorial campaign. I took that and went to Virginia to interview the people who were still living who could tell me what it was like in 1946 Richmond Virginia. And then I came back home and tried to stitch a novel together. Seven years later a book was published called Tobacco Sticks. I had no great hopes for the book that is really the story of a lawyer who takes a case that puts him against his neighbors and friends. But then the reviews came in.
And they were good and my literary career began. I am not sure I will ever write a book like this one again that tackles unions, race, family, civil rights, and the slow change coming to the South. But maybe you only get one shot at the big book and this was mine.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
Tobacco Sticks
