Ronald Fair was born in Chicago in 1932, spent three years as a hospital corpsman in the U.S. Navy and after his military service attended the Stenotype School of Chicago. For twelve years he worked as a court reporter. His writing appeared in the Chicago Daily Defender and the Chat Noir Review before the appearance of his critically acclaimed first novel, Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable (1965). Fair published a half dozen books in his career, including the novels Hog Butcher (1966), World of Nothing (1970), and We Can't Breathe (1972) as well as a collection of poetry. Hog Butcher was adapted to the screen as Cornbread, Earl and Me (1975), starring Rosalind Cash and Laurence Fishburne. Increasingly disenchanted with American politics and culture, Fair left the United States for Finland in 1971, where he became a sculptor. He died in 2018. W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi's Dark Past, and The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South. From 1995 to 2013 he was the Director of Publishing of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and he is the former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. Currently he is the faculty fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.