Tito Perdue

Perdue was born in Chile to American parents. He was brought up in Anniston, Alabama. He married his wife Judy when he was 18. He has degrees in English literature, European history and library science. He has worked as a bookkeeper, a library administrator and an apprentice insurance underwriter throughout the Midwest and Northeast, before he moved back to the South in 1982 to pursue a career as a full-time writer.[1]

Perdue's Sweet-Scented Manuscript was completed within a year of his "retirement," but was not published until 2004 when it was issued by Baskerville Pres). The novel is a love story that attempts to convey the impressions and yearnings of an 18-year-old boy, Leland Pefley, in his first exploration of the world; the novel is largely autobiographical. Perdue's next novel, Lee, was about the same Leland Pefley, now an old man, bitter, hostile, angry at a world that no longer recognized the values and culture of the 1950s. He spewed venom at those who, surrounded by beauty, culture and literature, didn't bother to avail themselves of it. Other works include The Node, Fields of Asphodel and The New Austerities, which depicts Lee Pefley's flight from New York City back to his ancestral home in Alabama. That same year, Baskerville Press published Perdue's Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture, a strange fictional account of an Alabama man, school teacher, rural route mail carrier, and farmer.[1]

In the pages of Kirkus Reviews it was said Perdue "writes convincingly and iconoclastically… a marvelous black comedy that is sometimes as astringent as John Yount's Toots in Solitude…"[2]

Perdue is a member of the League of the South, a Neo-Confederate group. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled the group as a "hate group", something Perdue contests.[1]

• Lee – Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991; repr. Overlook Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-58567-872-3.
• The New Austerities – Peachtree Press, 1994. ISBN 978-1-56145-086-2.
• Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture – Baskerville Press, 1994. ISBN 978-1-880909-24-9.
• The Sweet-Scented Manuscript – Baskerville Press, 2004. ISBN 978-1-880909-68-3.
• Fields of Asphodel – Overlook Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-58567-871-6.
• The Node – Nine-Banded Books, 2011. ISBN 978-1-61658-351-4.
• Morning Crafts – Arktos, 2013. ISBN 978-1-907166-57-0.

• Official Website