A life reclaimed through storytelling
A01=William Cobb
Addiction and recovery
Alabama College
Alabama writers
Alcoholism
and survival
Artistic identity
Author_William Cobb
Becoming a writer in the American South
Category=DNBL
Category=JBFN
Creative life
Creativity and sobriety
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Harper Lee Award
Illness and healing
Life in academia
literary biography
Literature and lived experience
personal memoir
Personal transformation
playwright
rehabilitation
Southern Gothic
Southern literature
Southern storytelling tradition
Teaching
Teaching writing
The costs of artistic ambition
Twentieth-century American writers
University of Montevallo
William Cobb
Writer's life
writer-in-residence
writing
Writing and resilience
Product details
- ISBN 9780817318765
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 148 x 223mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2015
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In this audacious memoir, William Cobb reveals the tumultuous creative life of a distinguished practitioner of southern and Alabama storytelling. As poignant and inspiring as his own fiction, Captain Billy’s Troopers traces Cobb’s early life, education, and struggles with alcohol and the debilitating condition normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH).
Like a curving river, the broad sweep of Cobb’s turbulent life includes both startling cataracts and desultory eddies, leading sometimes into shadows or opening into unexpected sunlight. With unsentimental clarity, Cobb recounts coming of age in his native Demopolis in the churning middle years of the twentieth century. It’s there he has his first tantalizing tastes of alcohol and begins to drink habitually. Readers then travel with Cobb to Livingston University (now the University of West Alabama) and then on to Vanderbilt University. Along the way, readers relish his first experiences of love and success as a writer, leading to a career as a professor of writing at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo) in 1963.
From there Cobb’s struggles with alcohol and depression lead to elongated years of tumbling creative output and the collapse of his marriage. The summer of 1984 found Cobb in rehab, the first step in his path to recovery. His unflinching memoir narrates both the milestones and telling details of his intense therapy and years in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). In the sober thirty years since, Cobb has published a string of critically praised novels and a prize-winning collection of short stories. The capstone of his comeback was winning the Harper Lee Award in 2007 for distinguished fiction writing.
In 2000, shortly after retiring, Cobb developed NPH, which upset his sense of balance and triggered dementia symptoms and other maladies. Nine years later in 2009, brain surgery brought Cobb a dramatic recovery, which began the third act in his writing career. Vital, honest, and entertaining, Captain Billy’s Troopers captures the life of an Alabama original.
Like a curving river, the broad sweep of Cobb’s turbulent life includes both startling cataracts and desultory eddies, leading sometimes into shadows or opening into unexpected sunlight. With unsentimental clarity, Cobb recounts coming of age in his native Demopolis in the churning middle years of the twentieth century. It’s there he has his first tantalizing tastes of alcohol and begins to drink habitually. Readers then travel with Cobb to Livingston University (now the University of West Alabama) and then on to Vanderbilt University. Along the way, readers relish his first experiences of love and success as a writer, leading to a career as a professor of writing at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo) in 1963.
From there Cobb’s struggles with alcohol and depression lead to elongated years of tumbling creative output and the collapse of his marriage. The summer of 1984 found Cobb in rehab, the first step in his path to recovery. His unflinching memoir narrates both the milestones and telling details of his intense therapy and years in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). In the sober thirty years since, Cobb has published a string of critically praised novels and a prize-winning collection of short stories. The capstone of his comeback was winning the Harper Lee Award in 2007 for distinguished fiction writing.
In 2000, shortly after retiring, Cobb developed NPH, which upset his sense of balance and triggered dementia symptoms and other maladies. Nine years later in 2009, brain surgery brought Cobb a dramatic recovery, which began the third act in his writing career. Vital, honest, and entertaining, Captain Billy’s Troopers captures the life of an Alabama original.
William Cobb was born in Eutaw, Alabama, and was raised in Demopolis. He received an MA in English from Vanderbilt University in 1963 and began teaching at Alabama College (now the University of Montevallo, USA). In 1978, he was awarded a fellowship for creative writing by the National Endowment for the Arts. Cobb’s first novel, Coming of Age at the Y, was published in 1984. Between 1984 and 2001, he published five more novels and a collection of short stories. In the 1980s, Cobb began writing plays. Three of his plays have been produced in New York City. Cobb was made writer-in-residence at Montevallo in 1987 and continued in that position until his retirement in 2000.
