Bookmark with Don Noble: John Sledge (2011)

John S. Sledge has spent much of his career studying, preserving, and interpreting the history of Mobile, Alabama. As book review editor for the Mobile Press-Register and architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission, Sledge has brought together a critic’s eye, a historian’s discipline, and a deep affection for the Gulf Coast. In this episode of Bookmark with Don Noble, Don Noble speaks with John Sledge in Reese Phifer Hall on the campus of The University of Alabama. Their conversation explores Sledge’s work on Mobile’s built environment, its literary and cultural history, and the stories preserved in the city’s cemeteries, ironwork, and Greek Revival architecture. With Sheila Hagler, Sledge is the author of three important books on Mobile: Cities of Silence: A Guide to Mobile’s Historic Cemeteries, An Ornament to the City: Old Mobile Ironwork, and The Pillared City: Greek Revival Mobile. Across these works, Sledge documents the architecture, craftsmanship, and memory embedded in one of the South’s oldest and most distinctive cities. Sledge later expanded his work with books including The Mobile River, Southern Bound, These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War, and The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History. A longtime member of the National Book Critics Circle, he is recognized as one of Alabama’s leading voices on Mobile history, architecture, and Gulf Coast culture. Bookmark with Don Noble features conversations with writers whose work has shaped Alabama, the South, and American literature.