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Two books have meant more to Clyde Edgerton’s career than any others. The first was a journal he kept in the late 1970s. He was teaching English education at what is now Campbell University. He’d just written his first short story — a piece about a young man who falls through a soft spot in the floor of his family’s kitchen — but writing remained on the periphery of his life.
Not long after penning his first story, Edgerton watched Eudora Welty read her short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” on public television. Immediately inspired, he opened his journal and wrote, “Tomorrow morning, I will start being a fiction writer.” That was May 14, 1978.
Since that entry, Edgerton has published 10 novels, a memoir about his experience as a pilot, an advice manual for fathers, and dozens of essays and short stories. He’s received many accolades, from UNC Chapel Hill’s Thomas Wolfe Prize to a Guggenheim Fellowship to the North Carolina Award for Literature. In 2016, Edgerton was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. His humorous takes on Southern culture, politics, and religion have been compared to those of writers like Mark Twain and Flannery O’Connor.
So it’s no surprise that, along with his journal, the other book that has weighed heavily on Edgerton’s career is The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. In his copy, the end pages are filled with notes. “I made two columns,” Edgerton says. “In one I wrote down important things O’Connor says about writing. In the other I wrote down important things she says about religion.”
Writing and religion: Edgerton has long thought about both. He grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church in the small Durham County community of Bethesda and earned a degree in English education from UNC Chapel Hill. He then spent five years as an Air Force fighter pilot in Korea, Japan, and Thailand. But storytelling was often on his mind, and so was Christianity.
illustration by Andrea Cheung
“My father was quiet,” Edgerton says. “He sat in the back pew, and I never heard him pray, but he was always in church. My mother was in the choir, taught classes, and served the church in every way she could. She would say that she believed that each word in the Bible was the literal truth.”
He pauses as if recalling those long services and Wednesday night prayer meetings, a lifetime of sermons, hymns, and Sunday school lessons.
“But over the years, the more I studied the Bible, the more inconsistencies I began to find in everything, from translations of the Greek and Hebrew writings to the various meanings of the Bible itself.”
After publishing several novels, Edgerton was asked to contribute a short story to a collection inspired by the work of Flannery O’Connor. He wrote about a wayward Bible salesman who encounters a murderous car thief. Fans of O’Connor might recognize these two as descendants of the Bible salesman Manley Pointer in “Good Country People” and The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
Edgerton soon found himself writing a novel in which a 20-year-old fundamentalist tries to stake his claim as a traveling Bible salesman.
Last year, Edgerton retired as the Kenan Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing after 25 years at UNC Wilmington. Now, he’s writing full-time, but he still ponders those childhood experiences with faith.
“Religion is often on my mind, especially as I’ve grown older.” Forty years into his career, Edgerton remains fascinated by both the sacred and secular written word.
photograph by Matt Hulsman
Although Flannery O’Connor’s violent Misfit from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and her duplicitous Bible salesman from “Good Country People” receive only passing mentions in Clyde Edgerton’s The Bible Salesman, the spirits of these two characters animate the 2008 novel. Henry Dampier is a sweet-natured 20-year-old who hits the road with a valise full of Bibles to sell. Preston Clearwater is a hardened car thief who’s looking for an easy mark to assist him in a traveling theft ring. When approached by Clearwater under the guise of assisting the FBI, Dampier believes he’s one of the good guys, and he also believes every word inside the Bibles he’s trying to sell. But the more time Dampier spends on the road, reading his Bible and pursuing a relationship with a good country girl, the more he begins to understand that things are not always what they seem — including his partnership with Clearwater and his belief in the Bible’s infallibility. The Bible Salesman is by turn hilarious, horrifying, and, ultimately, hopeful.
More to Explore: Hear Clyde Edgerton in new episodes out June 3 and 17. Listen at ourstate.com/podcasts.
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