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William Terry Couch (1901-1988) began his four-decade publishing career building the University of North Carolina Press into one of the nation's leading university presses. His editorial attacks on the social ills of the South earned him a reputation as a southern liberal. By the 1940s, his disaffection with New Deal politics turned him toward the right, resulting in his 1950 firing as director of the University of Chicago Press.
As a conservative, Couch sought books and articles that would sway general readers from what he saw as an intellectual torpor that accepted the growing role of government in American life. The liberals who controlled the presses found him dogmatic and irascible. When he tried to turn Collier's Encyclopedia into a journal of conservative opinion, he was fired as editor in chief in 1959. He ended his career as publisher for the libertarian William Volker Fund, which collapsed in the 1960s under charges of Nazism.
Couch was committed to publishing as a social cause and strove to disturb American complacency. This is the first book-length biography of Couch--a publisher who brought academic scholarship to the reading public to effect social, political and economic change.
List of contents
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ¿vi
Introduction ¿1
1.¿A University Press in the South ¿7
2.¿Culture in the South ¿39
3.¿Books That Ought to Be Written ¿63
4.¿A Case History in Book Publishing ¿87
5.¿Objectivity and Social Science ¿117
6.¿The Sainted Book Burners ¿145
7.¿Do Intellectuals Have Minds? ¿164
8.¿The Human Potential for Modernism ¿193
9.¿The Word and the Rope ¿215
Chapter Notes ¿231
Bibliography ¿251
Index ¿260
About the author
The late Orvin Lee Shiflett was a professor and chair of the Department of Library and Information Studies at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
