LHAMON, W(illiam) T(aylor), Jr. 1945-

PERSONAL: Born January 3, 1945, in Washington, DC; son of William Taylor (a physician and teacher) and Elizabeth (a psychologist; maiden name, Kearton) Lhamon; married Judith Clay; children: William Taylor III, Catherine Elizabeth. Education: Johns Hopkins University, B.A., 1966; Indiana University, Ph.D., 1973. Politics: "Homeless Left."

ADDRESSES: Home—2412 Willow Ave., Tallahassee, FL 32303. Offıce—Department of English, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306. Agent— Donald Cutler, Sterling Lord Agency, 660 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10021.

CAREER: Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno), Fresno, CA, assistant professor of English, 1970-71; Florida State University, Tallahassee, assistant professor, 1971-75, associate professor of English, beginning 1975, now George Mills Harper Professor of English.

MEMBER: College English Association, Modern Language Association of America, Popular Culture Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Amoco Foundation award, 1975.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Kenneth R. Johnston) The Rhetoric ofConflict, Bobbs-Merrill (New York, NY), 1969.

Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian Institution Press (Washington, DC), 1990.

Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1998.

Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Selected Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George L. Levine and David Leverenz, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1975; and American Humor: A Study of the National Character, University Presses of Florida (Tallahassee, FL), 1986. Author of "Record Review," a jazz and rock music column in New Republic. Contributor of articles and reviews to popular magazines and literary journals, including Western Humanities Review, Studies in Black Literature, and American Studies.

SIDELIGHTS: W. T. Lhamon, Jr. once told CA: "What this country needs along with justice and a modicum of dignity is a magazine that takes popular culture seriously, one that pays attention to the same things that Rolling Stone does, but at the level that New York Review attends to books."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Library Journal, July, 2003, Carol J. Binkowski, review of Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture, p. 85.*