A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road

The author’s road trips through the American South lead to a personal confrontation with history

In A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road, Pete Candler offers a travel narrative drawn from twenty-five years of road-tripping through the backroads of the American South. Featuring Candler’s own photography, the book taps into the public imagination and the process of both remembering and forgetting that define our collective memory of place. Candler, who belongs to one of Georgia’s most recognizable families, confronts the uncomfortable truths of his own ancestors’ roles in the South’s legacy of white supremacy with a masterful mix of authority and a humbling sense that his own journey of unforgetting and recovering has only just begun.

Pete Candler, born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Commonweal, The Bitter Southerner, The Christian Century, The Chicago Tribune, Southern Cultures, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. A graduate of Wake Forest University and The University of Cambridge, and a former professor of theology, he now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he writes about memory and forgetfulness in the American South. His photography collection, The Road to Unforgetting: Detours in the American South 1997 - 2022, was published in 2022.