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Tito Perdue | |
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| Born | Albert Monroe Perdue 16 August 1938 |
| Pen name | Tito Perdue |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Antioch College, University of Texas |
| Genre | Novel, satire |
| Subject | Degeneration, beauty |
| Notable works | Lee (1991) |
| Spouse | Judy Clark (m. 1957) |
| Children | 1 |
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| titoperdue | |
Tito Perdue (born 16 August 1938) is an American novelist. His works include his 1991 debut Lee .
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]
Judy Perdue worked as a librarian and professor of biology at Floyd College and elsewhere. [4] [16] She is fellow of the Royal Entomological Society (London) and member of other learned associations. [4] [16] Her father, Christopher Clark, wrote novels of working class life, including The Unleashed Will (1947) and Good Is for Angels (1950). [17] [18] [19] [20]
The Perdues have one daughter. [4] [16] They live in Centreville and Wetumpka, Alabama. [21]
As of 2001, Perdue was a member of the League of the South (since renamed), an American white nationalist, neo-Confederate, white supremacist organization. [2]
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]
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]
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]
On March 7, 2015, Perdue received the first H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature. [39] The trophy was a porcelain bust of Lovecraft by Charles Krafft. [40]
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