The Road to Pickletown is a collection of newspaper columns by William Jeanes, a former editor-in-chief and publisher of Car and Driver magazine who lives in Mississippi. The pieces include an eclectic selection of recent columns from William's weekly newspaper, the Northside Sun. The Sun is headquartered in Jackson, Mississippi. The columns range in tone from warmly humorous to serious outrage and cover subjects that veer from progressive politics to prohibition and from cowbells to Cuba. Most but by no means all have a connection to Mississippi and the south--as seen by a native son who spent more than half his life in New York City and in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Other columns were written for a national audience and were published in Playboy, Sports Illustrated, the Saturday Evening Post, Car and Driver, and Automobile. Their subjects include the joys of driving at night, wartime baseball, the woman who struck out Babe Ruth, the Safari Rally in Kenya, shooting sporting clays, and Elvis as a film critic.
In addition to the publications cited, William's work has appeared in American Heritage, Air & Space Smithsonian, the New York Times, Consumer Digest, New Times, Advertising Age, and more automotive publications than he cares to count.
William left Mississippi twice, once to serve as an officer in the US Navy, and once to work for magazines and advertising agencies. He was gone for almost forty years. Long enough to gain perspective on a country that delivers endless fuel for a writer who can spot the fools, frauds, and feeble thinkers from a considerable distance.
The author of The Road to Pickletown lives in Ridgeland, Mississippi. He has been a board member of the Eudora Welty Foundation, writer-in-residence at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and is a Life Trustee of Millsaps College, his alma mater.