Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Foreword by Ted Ownby
Introduction: The Death of Elvis
Part One: The Bubble
Ch. 1 The Dream
Ch. 2 The Killers of the Dream
Part Two: Why Elvis?
Ch. 3 Vernon and Gladys
Ch. 4 East Tupelo and Tupelo
Ch. 5 Memphis
Ch. 6 Dixie Locke and Sam Phillips
Ch. 7 A Girl in the Bed
Part Three: Comeback and Die
Ch. 8 The Comeback Special
Ch. 9 Girls and Guns
Ch. 10 Psycho
Part Four: The Fall
Ch. 11 The Bodyguard Book
Ch. 12 Saved
Ch. 13 Graceland
Ch. 14 The Last Day
Conclusion: The Meditation Garden
Notes
Index

About the Author

Joel Williamson, Lineberger Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of a number of landmark works on Southern culture, including William Faulkner and Southern History (OUP, 1993) and The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (OUP, 1984), which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the Ralph
Emerson Award. Both books were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

Ted Ownby is Professor of History and Southern Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998, among other books.

Donald L. Shaw, who assisted with the final editing, is Kenan Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author and co-author of numerous titles, including The Emergence of American Political Issues: The Agenda Setting Function of the Press.

Reviews

Praise for William Faulkner and Southern History:
"Mississippi--with its heady brew of race, sex, and violence--is brilliantly reconfigured in Joel Williamson's William Faulkner and Southern History." --The Nation
"As rigorous as the best history and as absorbing as the best novel." --William E. Cain, Wellesley College
"Williamson, who once described himself as a failed novelist turned historian, demonstrates a remarkable gift for language, image, and detail. His aim is to reproduce the world which created William Faulkner rather than the other way around. And he succeeds... Williamson... understands the creative artistry involved in writing biography." --Charles J. Bussey, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
"No one who reads this complex and elegantly written book from cover to cover can help but be impressed by the intellectual depth and breadth of Williamson's passionately humanistic scholarship." --Raymond Arsenault, North Carolina Historical Review
Praise for The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation:
"The most conspicuous landmark of scholarship in an important field... A deeper and more thorough penetration of the endless complexities of the subject than any ever attempted before." --C. Vann Woodward, The New Republic
"Williamson writes with enormous energy, authority, and intelligence... Grappling with a central problem in the history of his nation, his native South, and his own life, gives The Crucible of Race the force that elevates it from fine scholarly study to a work of great history." --Ira Berlin, Florida Historical Quarterly
"A major reinterpretation... [of] the white Southern psyche after the Civil War....Williamson has deepened our understanding of [Southern history's] tragic dimensions and enduring legacies." --Leon F. Litwack, New York Times Book Review
"A remarkable mixture of careful, empirically based historical work and free-wheeling cultural commentary in the vein of W. J. Cash and other imaginative writers on the Southern psyche." --George M. Frederickson, New York Review of Books
"An audacious, and often moving, account of one white southern historian's attempt to unravel the complex history of white attitudes and ideas about race." --Dan T. Carter, American Historical Review
"[A] well-researched but sentimental review of Presley's life and influence on US culture." -CHOICE