Marshall Frady was a literary journalist who blazed across the magazine world of Life, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker from the 1960s until his untimely death in 2004. A serious craftsman steeped in Southern literature and history, Frady amazed, inspired or outraged colleagues and critics by insisting on writing about his subjects “with the deepest possible registers and sensings” in a prose style all his own. His biographies of George Wallace, Billy Graham, Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr. endure as at once deeply reported and engagingly novelistic.
But Frady’s life, as W&L journalism department Prof. Doug Cumming is discovering, was also a struggle to survive creditors and the requirements of three ex-wives and their children. Cumming, on a nine-month break from teaching, is the first researcher to dig into the Frady Papers – 58 boxes of drafts, letters and notes – that Emory University bought in 2008 at an unusual auction in New York City. The IRS had seized the papers from Frady’s widow because of $200,000 Frady owed in back taxes and fines. Emory won the competitive bidding at $10,100.
Cumming will present some of his initial findings in a panel that he proposed for a March 18-19 symposium in Columbia, S.C., on the media and civil rights history. The panel is titled “Writing the Movement: The Literary Journalism of James Baldwin, Marhall Frady and Willie Morris.” Cumming envisions other scholarly harvestings from the Frady papers, such as a study of the protracted drama that Billy Graham’s organization and Frady’s book publisher engaged in over an ethically problematic, secret pre-publication review of the manuscript by Graham’s people.
“Although the papers are currently unprocessed, I’m glad to find that Marshall kept his papers well organized and had perfectly legible handwriting,” Cumming said.
During his break, Cumming will also be editing a book compiling selected letters-to-the-editor from 200 years of weekly newspapers in Lexington – to be published by the local Mariner Media, with a Lenfest grant and assistance from Robert E. Lee Research Scholars – and will be teaching at the Institute for Education in International Media (ieiMedia) in Urbino, Italy, in June.
