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| Ned Cobb aka Nate Shaw with wife Viola and child Andrew in 1907 Photo courtesy of Theodore Rosengarten |
Nineteen seventy-four was a good year for nonfiction writing in America. Robert A. Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” came out. So did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men.” So did “Working,” by Studs Terkel, and Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
Each was a finalist for the National Book Award. Yet the winner in general nonfiction — the category was then called contemporary affairs — was “All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw,” an oral history of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper. Its author, the man who compiled it from extensive interviews, was a writer named Theodore Rosengarten.
Forty years later, we remember “The Power Broker,” “All the President’s Men,” “Working” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” But in a troubling quirk of history, “All God’s Dangers” has all but fallen off the map.
Somewhere along the line, people stopped talking about it. Friends of mine who talk about nothing except Southern literature have barely heard of the book. I pounced on it after I discovered that Richard Howorth, the well-read owner of Square Books, the independent bookstore in Oxford, Miss., utters its title aloud every time a customer asks the question, “What one book would you say best explains the South?”
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