Perdue was born Albert Perdue to American parents in Chile, where his father worked as an electrical engineer for the Braden Copper Company.[1][a] The family returned to the United States in 1941, upon the country's entering the War. Perdue was brought up in Anniston, Alabama.[2][3] He graduated from Indian Springs School in 1956.[3] He attended Antioch College for a year before he was expelled for cohabiting with a fellow student, Judy Clark.[3] They married in 1957.[3][4]
Perdue received a BA in English literature from the University of Texas, and an MA in modern European history and an MLS from Indiana University.[5] He then worked as an assistant professor and librarian at universities including Iowa State University and SUNY Binghamton.[6][7][8] During this time, he contributed under his birth name to scholarly journals of history and library science.[9][8][10][11][12] In 1983, he retired to his mother's family's Alabama property to write full time.[13][14] He wrote The Sweet-Scented Manuscript first; though this would be his fourth novel published.[15]
Many of Perdue's novels chronicle the life of Leland "Lee" Pefley,[22] an alter ego who, Perdue explains, "actually carries out actions that his creator would often wish to perform if he but had the courage."[23] In order, these are The Smut Book (Pefley aged 11), Morning Crafts (aged 13), The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (at college), The New Austerities (aged 42), Journey to a Location and Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Shall Come (both aged 70), Materials for All Future Historians (aged 71), Lee (aged 72) and Fields of Asphodel (in the afterlife).[15][24] An aged Pefley also features prominently in the first half of Reuben.[25] The lives of Lee's forebears are chronicled in Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture and the four-volume William's House, for which Perdue drew on records of his own family history.[2]
Perdue's novels are picaresques, built of "disjointed episodes."[21][26] He explains: "I don't believe that prose should be translucent. I don't believe that plot is all that matters. I believe that language matters greatly. ... My books have very little plot. I don't even like plot."[2] Perdue often incorporates elements of fantasy (like active volcanoes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Alabama)[27] or, in later novels, science fiction (like the "escrubilator," an indescribable "omni-competent" machine).[28]
Reception
Critical reception
Perdue's novels have encountered "critical but not much popular success."[14]Jim Knipfel and Gary Heidt have named Perdue among their favourite writers.[2][29] For Knipfel, Perdue is "without question, one of the most important contemporary Southern writers we have" and "among the most important American writers of the early 21st century."[22]
Critics have commented on Perdue's "idiosyncratic" prose.[14] Anne Whitehouse of The New York Times finds Lee "vitriolic and hallucinatory, yet surprisingly lucid, producing a portrait both exceedingly strange and troubling."[26] In the New York Press, Knipfel praises Perdue's "fluid, consciously musical prose,"[22] "full of rage but under complete control," noting that it becomes "progressively textured and more savage" with time.[2] However, Publishers Weekly finds that Lee "sinks under the weight of its own pretensions";[30] and Dick Roraback of the Los Angeles Times complains of Perdue's eccentric (mis)usages in The New Austerities.[31]
Thomas Fleming calls the Pefley sequence "some of the best satire on contemporary America";[32] and Kirkus Reviews notes the "marvelous black comedy" in Lee.[33]Antoine Wilson of the Los Angeles Times finds "tone-deaf caricature" in some satirical passages of Fields of Asphodel, but praises its "utterly charming and brilliantly comic" denouement.[34]
Scholarly reception
Lee is discussed in Bill Kauffman's analysis of secessionist literary fiction in Bye Bye, Miss American Empire (2010).[35] In Imagining Alternative Worlds (2025), Bernhard Forchtner and Christoffer Kølvraa discuss Perdue's fiction as exemplary of the "nostalgic imaginary."[36]
His academic writing (as Albert Perdue) continues to be cited.[37][38]
Review of Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Le Pélerinage à la Mekke: Étude d'Histoire Religieuse, in The Reprint Bulletin Book Reviews, vol. xxiv, no. 1 (1979), p.5.
Review of Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid-Marsot, Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, in Journal of Asian History, vol. 14, no. 2 (1980), pp.149–50.
Review of Eliyahu Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages, in The American Historical Review, vol. 85, no. 2 (April 1980), p.439.
Notes
↑ In an interview on Counter-Currents Radio, ep. 205 (20 November 2017), 00:56-01:22, Perdue explains: "I was named, after my father, 'Albert.' But in Chile, the word tito means 'little.' It also can mean 'junior.' So I was called 'Albertito,' you know, 'Albert, Jr.,' 'little Albert.' And after a while they dropped the 'Albert' and people began calling me 'Tito.' And it sounds so much more literary, you know, than merely 'Albert': so I decided to use that for my pen-name."
↑ Albert Perdue, review of Eliyahu Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages, in The American Historical Review, vol. 85, no. 2 (April 1980), p. 439.
↑ Biography, The Sweet-Scented Manuscript (Fort Worth, TX: Baskerville, 2004).
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