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Everything He Wrote Was Good

The Pieces of Johnny Greene


I’ve just about decided one of two things: (1) I have a special tendency to meet crazy and weird people, or (2) every single person in New York is either crazy or weird.

—Letter to Martha Jane Patton, October 18, 1971

“Unlike Willie, my plane never turned ‘North towards Home,’” Johnny wrote in a letter to a friend in Alabama, referring to Willie Morris’s bestselling 1967 memoir. Morris, who was from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and edited Harper’s from 1967 to 1971, considered the 1960s New York literary world one “of awesome brilliance, even when its brilliance was a little predictable, and excepted for three or four notable operators, not very colorful.” Morris later reflected, “To escape the South—all of what it was and is—I would have to escape from myself.”

Johnny went the opposite of Morris. He refrained from diving into the New York literary scene—“a slicker lot than the Chukker crowd.” He found work as a typist at the American Civil Liberties Union and, in his spare time, read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (according to a letter, it was the only Southern newspaper Columbia’s library kept stocked) and indulged in Alabama sports clips his mother sent, hiding from the “groans and growls of New York.”

In a breathless letter to his friend and fellow Selma Project volunteer, Martha Jane Patton, he described an incident at a dinner at the Park Avenue penthouse of a Cue magazine editor, who called Johnny out: “Do you enjoy playing the Alabama hick?”

Johnny shot back, “I notice your mama and daddy never taught you how to hold a knife and fork.”

Read more at the Oxford American

 

“Obsession and Release: 10 Years to Write a Longread,” an interview with the author.
Longreads reviews Johnny Greene, “The Names You Know and the Names You Don’t.”

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