My road trips through the American South lead to a personal confrontation with history

In A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road, Pete Candler offers a travel narrative drawn from twenty-five years of road-tripping through the backroads of the American South. Featuring Candler's own photography, the book taps into the public imagination and the process of both remembering and forgetting that define our collective memory of place. Candler, who belongs to one of Georgia's most recognizable families, confronts the uncomfortable truths of his own ancestors' roles in the South's legacy of white supremacy with a masterful mix of authority and a humbling sense that his own journey of unforgetting and recovering has only just begun.

"Candler explores the truth hidden behind the romance of place and digs deep to seek out harsh truths that have been silenced, overlooked, or obscured by willful blindness. This is a book that will help foster a new way of seeing the South."
—W. Ralph Eubanks, author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape

"[Pete's] work is about the stories the South likes to tell and probably shouldn't and about the stories the South doesn't tell and most definitely should."
—Tommy Tomlinson, author of The Elephant in the Room, and host of the SouthBound podcast

"Part history, part memoir, and part self-discovery, Candler calls on us to face the demons of our past so that we can truly appreciate the region we call home."
—Karen L. Cox, author of Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture

"A beautifully conceived and executed piece of historical reclamation."
—Margaret Edds, former reporter, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, and author of What the Eyes Can't See: Ralph Northam, Black Resolve, and a Racial Reckoning in Virginia

"A righteous plumbing of suppressed family histories, a vigorous exorcism of the myths and willful ignorance that trouble the land of his birth, A Deeper South blazes a path through the nostalgia thicket for readers who want to make sense of their inheritances. Candler writes with indignation and empathy, showing us a better way to see the South so that we can better love any place we call home."
—John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers and host of TrueSouth

BOOKS

The Road to Unforgetting gathers 175 of Pete Candler’s black-and-white film photographs from road trips across the American South from 1997 to 2022, along with his insightful essay on the imaginative potential of the unplanned detour. A meditation on “back-roading” with a film camera as a spiritual exercise, Road documents lesser-known, often unmarked, sites in the history of the South that exist off the main drag of collective memory. A powerful collaboration of word and image in search of deeper truths, Road points towards a more complete understanding of America’s most singular region.

about PETE

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Pete Candler is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Commonweal, The Bitter Southerner, The Christian Century, The Chicago Tribune, Southern Cultures, The Washington Post, and others. A graduate of Wake Forest University (B.A.) and The University of Cambridge (M.Phil., Ph.D.), a student and former professor of theology, Pete writes about memory, forgetfulness, and the legacy of white supremacy in the American South. He is the author of a photography collection, The Road to Unforgetting: Detours in the American South 1997 - 2022 (Horse & Buggy Press, 2022), and A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road (University of South Carolina Press, 2024). Pete lives in Asheville with his wife, Meredith, and their four boys.