The Regulator welcomes Frye Gaillard, author of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost, for a reading and book signing
A Hard Rain is Frye Gaillard’s magnum opus, a magnificent memoir-cum-work-of-history. This is a sweeping account of the 1960s, told year by year, in which he touches on social unrest, black power, women’s liberation, the War in Vietnam and the protests against it. But he also examines the cultural manifestations of change – music, literature, art, religion, and science.
"Journalist Gaillard offers a comprehensive history of the 1960s that traces the decade’s fateful arc from its optimistic beginning— embodied in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural promise of a “new frontier” —to its end, traumatized by the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, as well as the Vietnam War. . . . Older readers will find this a sobering retrospective, and for those who didn’t live through the ’60s, it’s an enlightening picture of America at a historic juncture.” -- PW Starred Review
Frye Gaillard is an award-winning journalist with over 20 published works on Southern history and culture, including Watermelon Wine; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America; The Books That Mattered: A Reader's Memoir; Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family's Civil War Letters; and, most recently, Go South to Freedom. Writer-in-residence at the University of South Alabama, he is also John Egerton Scholar in Residence at the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Missisippi. He is the winner of the Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction Writing, the Lillian Smith Book Award, and the Eugene Current-Garcia Award For Distinction in Literary Scholarship.