Hartselle Library to host Bill Huie, community read

By By Submitted to the Enquirer
Local author Bill Huie will be at the Hartselle Depot Feb. 23 at 5 p.m.
Huie’s book Mud on the Stars will be available for purchase and copies will be given as door prizes. Refreshments will be served.
There will also be a community read of Mud on the Stars (1942), William Bradford Huie’s first novel, kicking off Feb. 23. Copies will be available at the library and the Book Seller.
In it, Huie tells the story of a young man much like himself — valedictorian of Morgan County High School, educated at the University of Alabama and a reporter at the Birmingham News in the years that led up to World War II.
The March Community Read of Mud on the Stars will conclude March 27 with a discussion led by Huie biographer and scholar Carol Puckett. The free lecture/discussion will be held in the auditorium of the Hartselle Fine Arts Center as a part of Hartselle’s “stop” on the Southern Literary Trail.
Namesake of Hartselle’s public library, Huie is an author who made “himself a part of the continuing struggle for freedom,” according to Dr. Martin Luther King in a1965 Introduction to Huie’s Three Lives for Mississippi.
William Bradford Huie chronicled events through the lives of individuals. In a 1979 interview gathered as part of Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954-1965), Huie said that he “always wanted to write about one person [because] … the story of ….the death of one person is always more dramatic than the death of a thousand, you know, or the death of ten, or anything else.” Huie used that formula again and again as he told the stories in articles and in books that sold more than 28 million copies.
Hartselle’s Southern Literary Trail event is being supported by the Alabama Humanities Foundation, The Alabama Arts Council, the City of Hartselle, the Friends of the Library, the William Bradford Huie Library of Hartselle, the Hartselle Library Board, the Hartselle Historical Society, the Hartselle Fine Arts Center, the Hartselle Chamber of Commerce, Hartselle City Schools, and Hartselle High School.
For additional information, visit the Southern Literary Trails website: www.southernliterarytrail.org.