More than a half century has passed since Farrar and Rinehart published Stars Fell on Alabama, a book today that is hardly read outside the state named in its title. But its release on June 26, 1934 was greeted with a critical acclaim and commercial success that stunned the author, the publishers, and even the book's promoters in the Literary Guild book club. There were enthusiastic front-page reviews in the book sections of the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and other major papers, By midsummer, Stars Fell on Alabama was selling 1,000 copies a day, and Farrar and Rinehart ordered two additional printings in an effort to keep up with the demand. To author Carl Carmer's chagrin, an enterprising composer borrowed the title for a dreamy dance tune that quickly became a hit.

The book also stirred critical and journalistic debate in the North and the South, a debate that still reverberated in Alabama when I first read it as a student at Birmingham-Southern College in the early 1960's. Some Northern reviewers scolded Carmer for being "soft" on the South by romanticizing the old plantation days and being overly tolerant of contemporary racial injustices. Some Southerners, meanwhile, accused Carmer of having violated the hospitality of white Alabamians by reporting on the state's tradition of lynchings, racial prejudice, and Ku Klux Klan activity. By modern standards, Carmer's criticisms seem mild, indeed, and his discussion of slavery, the Civil War, and race relations sometimes suggests an overly forgiving attitude toward the prejudices of the conservative whites who were his hosts. Yet, even to this day, it is possible to find Alabamians who view of Stars Fell on Alabama with scorn, because Carmer was one of the first writers to bring into public view the commonplace racism that white Alabama preferred to keep hidden from the world, and from its own conscience.