The Untidy Pilgrim

This classic coming-of-age novel, winner of the Lippincott Fiction

Prize for Young Novelists in 1954, is a deliberately comic portrayal of

Mobile madness, a malady specific to the Gulf Coast but recognizable

by all.

Eugene Walter's first novel is about a young man from a small central

Alabama town who goes south of the salt line to Mobile to work in a bank

and study law. As soon as this unnamed pilgrim arrives, he realizes

that--although he is still in Alabama--he has entered a separate physical

kingdom of banana trees and palm fronds, subtropical heat and humidity,

old houses and lacy wrought-iron balconies. In the land of clowns and

the kingdom of monkeys--in the town that can claim the oldest Mardi Gras

in America--there is no Puritan work ethic; the only ruling forces are those

of chaos, craziness, and caprice. Such forces overtake the pilgrim, seduce

him away from the beaten career path, and set him on a zigzag course through

life.

The Untidy Pilgrim celebrates the insularity

as well as the eccentricity of southerners--and Mobilians, in particular--in

the mid-20th century. Cut off from the national mainstream, they are portrayed

as devoid of that particularly American angst over what to do and accomplish

with one's life, and indulge instead in art, music, cooking, nature, and

love. In this novel Walter eschews the gloom and doom southern

literary tradition established by Faulkner, Capote, and McCullers to illuminate

the joyous quirkiness of human existence.

In 1954 this refreshing approach to the southern

scene garnered the praise of the judges for that year's Lippincott Fiction

Prize, Jacques Barzun, Diana Trilling, and Bernard DeVoto. This reissue

of the paperback in The University of Alabama Press's Deep South Books

series assures yet another generation the delight of Eugene Walter's award-winning

romp through Mobile.