Of
the many strange moments during the 1999 impeachment of President Bill Clinton, the strangest may have come when Senator Strom Thurmond swore in Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who presided at the trial. Not only did the 96-year-old South Carolina legislator possess a reputation for lechery (“When he dies,”
a
colleague once cracked, “they’ll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat in order to close the coffin lid”), but he also harbored his own sexual
secret: Seventy-four years earlier, Carrie Butler, a fetching black servant in the Thurmond family home, had given birth to Strom’s illegitimate daughter, Essie Mae. If his fellow conservatives could impeach President Clinton for an illicit affair with a White House intern, the onetime segregationist asked advisers, what would they do when he was revealed as the father of an illegitimate, racially mixed child?

In
December 2003, barely six months after Thurmond’s death at 100, The Washington Post broke the story. Essie Mae Washington-Williams, now a retired Los Angeles school teacher, was speaking up after decades of silence. Though rumors of Thurmond’s black daughter had long circulated in South Carolina, their confirmation, as Thurmond had foreseen, made front-page news. The impact, however, was surprising: While some blacks and liberals used the occasion both to point out the late Senator’s hypocrisy and point up the history of unwanted intimacies visited upon black women by white men in the South, most conservatives responded with tolerance.
For one thing, Essie Mae said that Thurmond, in his way, had been a good father, never denying the relationship and supporting her financially. For another, Thurmond’s white children in South Carolina, while not quite welcoming their black sister into the fold, extended her every courtesy, inviting her to family functions and to dine in their homes. Unlikely as it at one time would have seemed, Thurmond had bequeathed his fellow Southerners with an opportunity to contemplate their racial heritage and, possibly, move forward to greater understanding.

As
Jack Bass, a veteran South Carolina reporter, and Marilyn W. Thompson, the former Post reporter who found Essie Mae, tell it in Strom, their thorough, nuanced and at times stirring biography, the acknowledgement of the Senator’s black offspring was the improbable capstone of a life marked by many improbable events, some of them almost equally significant. The authors argue that Thurmond unwittingly led the South into the future, contending that more than any other Southern politician of the 20th century, he acted out the region’s pivotal dramas. In the process, he changed the nation as well.

The
transformation began in 1948 when as South Carolina’s governor Thurmond briefly broke from the Democratic Party to accept the Dixiecrat nomination to run for President. Thurmond’s defection, which appealed to the region’s worst instincts regarding race and betrayed his earlier incarnation as a New Dealer with progressive views, set the stage for the destruction of the solid South. The shape of things to come was further outlined in 1964 when Thurmond, who’d been elected to the Senate in 1954, bolted from the Democratic Party for good and joined the Republicans. In 1968, Thurmond delivered Dixie to Richard Nixon, thereby ending the old order and christening the one that still prevails. In the wake of all of this, other Southern Democrats changed stripes, the Supreme Court grew more conservative (Thurmond single-handedly defeated the nomination of Abe Fortas), and the two George Bushes (Lee Atwater, campaign capo to the elder Bush, was a Thurmond protégé) ascended to the highest office in the land.

That
Thurmond, a physical-fitness fanatic who on the eve of his first marriage posed standing on his head for Life magazine, could turn the political world on its head owes much to the views he absorbed in his hometown of Edgefield, S.C., which perches on the Savannah River between the Piedmont and the low country. A Faulknerian hamlet where the South’s beliefs regarding individualism, race and honor coalesced into an unspoken faith, Edgefield endowed its native sons with a fierce zeal. In Mr.
Bass and Ms. Thompson’s nice turn of phrase, Thurmond approached life with “the boldness of an Edgefield man.” No wonder that as an Army officer during World War II, he volunteered to fly a glider into France on D-Day.

Thurmond’s
confidence often swelled into a ludicrous kind of vanity, particularly as it related to his dealings with the ladies. Though he had loving relationships with each of his two wives and was capable of courtliness, he was, at heart, a rogue. Even on his best behavior, he was prone—as evidenced by his conduct at a Washington party in the late 1950’s when he slithered between the writer Sally Quinn and her mother and simultaneously fondled both women’s bottoms—to rascality. This, however, was mild stuff. The authors corroborate a longstanding South Carolina legend that as governor Thurmond slept with a mistress who’d been convicted of murder as she was being transferred from the state prison to the death house, where she was ultimately executed.

By
the time Thurmond retired from the Senate in 2003, he was both the oldest man to hold office in the upper chamber and its longest-serving member. For all of this, however, he did not accomplish much legislatively. Indeed, during his half-century in Washington, the largely abstemious Senator’s biggest claim to fame was as the sponsor of a bill to get warning labels placed on alcoholic beverages. No matter: It was as a force of nature that Strom exerted influence.
When brute strength was needed to combat the Civil Rights Act in 1957, Thurmond prepared himself by sitting in a Washington steam bath (the better to avoid trips to the urinal later), then filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes, still a record. Indeed, Thurmond was so powerful that he sometimes sweeps Mr.
Bass and Ms. Thompson off their reportorial feet. The two covered the Senator for many years and have an irksome habit of referring to themselves in the third person at key moments in the book. Such passages, while they attest to the authors’ closeness to the great man, are overly familiar and disrupt an otherwise seamless narrative.

Such
quibbles notwithstanding, Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson (who in 2003 published Ol’ Strom, a tune-up for this volume that by necessity includes nothing about Essie Mae) have produced what for now is the definitive work. Not only do they illuminate their subject’s life, but they offer a parallel account of Essie Mae’s.

Though
the authors don’t spell out their view on what it all means, they conclude with a couple of telling vignettes: On July 1, 2004, in a ceremony at the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia, Essie Mae’s name was engraved on a monument to Thurmond alongside those of his white children. Shortly thereafter, this proud, black woman—who, like her father, exhibits Edgefield boldness—applied for membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Old
times may not be forgotten in the land of cotton, but thanks to Strom and Essie Mae, new times are sure enough different.

Steve Oney, author of And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (Vintage), is a senior writer at Los Angeles magazine.

Of
the many strange moments during the 1999 impeachment of President Bill Clinton,
the strangest may have come when Senator Strom Thurmond swore in Chief Justice
William Rehnquist, who presided at the trial. Not only did the 96-year-old
South Carolina legislator possess a reputation for lechery (“When he dies,” a
colleague once cracked, “they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball
bat in order to close the coffin lid”), but he also harbored his own sexual
secret: Seventy-four years earlier, Carrie Butler, a fetching black servant in
the Thurmond family home, had given birth to Strom's illegitimate daughter,
Essie Mae. If his fellow conservatives could impeach President Clinton for an
illicit affair with a White House intern, the onetime segregationist asked
advisers, what would they do when he was revealed as the father of an
illegitimate, racially mixed child?

In
December 2003, barely six months after Thurmond's death at 100, The Washington Post broke the story. Essie
Mae Washington-Williams, now a retired Los Angeles school teacher, was speaking
up after decades of silence. Though rumors of Thurmond's black daughter had
long circulated in South Carolina, their confirmation, as Thurmond had
foreseen, made front-page news. The impact, however, was surprising: While some
blacks and liberals used the occasion both to point out the late Senator's
hypocrisy and point up the history of unwanted intimacies visited upon black
women by white men in the South, most conservatives responded with tolerance.
For one thing, Essie Mae said that Thurmond, in his way, had been a good
father, never denying the relationship and supporting her financially. For
another, Thurmond's white children in South Carolina, while not quite welcoming
their black sister into the fold, extended her every courtesy, inviting her to
family functions and to dine in their homes. Unlikely as it at one time would
have seemed, Thurmond had bequeathed his fellow Southerners with an opportunity
to contemplate their racial heritage and, possibly, move forward to greater
understanding.

As
Jack Bass, a veteran South Carolina reporter, and Marilyn W. Thompson, the
former Post reporter who found Essie
Mae, tell it in Strom, their
thorough, nuanced and at times stirring biography, the acknowledgement of the
Senator's black offspring was the improbable capstone of a life marked by many
improbable events, some of them almost equally significant. The authors argue
that Thurmond unwittingly led the South into the future, contending that more
than any other Southern politician of the 20th century, he acted out the
region's pivotal dramas. In the process, he changed the nation as well.

The
transformation began in 1948 when as South Carolina's governor Thurmond briefly
broke from the Democratic Party to accept the Dixiecrat nomination to run for
President. Thurmond's defection, which appealed to the region's worst instincts
regarding race and betrayed his earlier incarnation as a New Dealer with
progressive views, set the stage for the destruction of the solid South. The
shape of things to come was further outlined in 1964 when Thurmond, who'd been
elected to the Senate in 1954, bolted from the Democratic Party for good and
joined the Republicans. In 1968, Thurmond delivered Dixie to Richard Nixon,
thereby ending the old order and christening the one that still prevails. In
the wake of all of this, other Southern Democrats changed stripes, the Supreme
Court grew more conservative (Thurmond single-handedly defeated the nomination
of Abe Fortas), and the two George Bushes (Lee Atwater, campaign capo to the
elder Bush, was a Thurmond protégé) ascended to the highest office in the land.

That
Thurmond, a physical-fitness fanatic who on the eve of his first marriage posed
standing on his head for Life
magazine, could turn the political world on its head owes much to the views he
absorbed in his hometown of Edgefield, S.C., which perches on the Savannah
River between the Piedmont and the low country. A Faulknerian hamlet where the
South's beliefs regarding individualism, race and honor coalesced into an
unspoken faith, Edgefield endowed its native sons with a fierce zeal. In Mr.
Bass and Ms. Thompson's nice turn of phrase, Thurmond approached life with “the
boldness of an Edgefield man.” No wonder that as an Army officer during World
War II, he volunteered to fly a glider into France on D-Day.

Thurmond's
confidence often swelled into a ludicrous kind of vanity, particularly as it
related to his dealings with the ladies. Though he had loving relationships
with each of his two wives and was capable of courtliness, he was, at heart, a
rogue. Even on his best behavior, he was prone—as evidenced by his conduct at a
Washington party in the late 1950's when he slithered between the writer Sally
Quinn and her mother and simultaneously fondled both women's bottoms—to
rascality. This, however, was mild stuff. The authors corroborate a
longstanding South Carolina legend that as governor Thurmond slept with a
mistress who'd been convicted of murder as she was being transferred from the
state prison to the death house, where she was ultimately executed.

By
the time Thurmond retired from the Senate in 2003, he was both the oldest man
to hold office in the upper chamber and its longest-serving member. For all of
this, however, he did not accomplish much legislatively. Indeed, during his
half-century in Washington, the largely abstemious Senator's biggest claim to
fame was as the sponsor of a bill to get warning labels placed on alcoholic
beverages. No matter: It was as a force of nature that Strom exerted influence.
When brute strength was needed to combat the Civil Rights Act in 1957, Thurmond
prepared himself by sitting in a Washington steam bath (the better to avoid
trips to the urinal later), then filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes,
still a record. Indeed, Thurmond was so powerful that he sometimes sweeps Mr.
Bass and Ms. Thompson off their reportorial feet. The two covered the Senator
for many years and have an irksome habit of referring to themselves in the
third person at key moments in the book. Such passages, while they attest to
the authors' closeness to the great man, are overly familiar and disrupt an
otherwise seamless narrative.

Such
quibbles notwithstanding, Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson (who in 2003 published
Ol' Strom, a tune-up for this volume
that by necessity includes nothing about Essie Mae) have produced what for now
is the definitive work. Not only do they illuminate their subject's life, but
they offer a parallel account of Essie Mae's.

Though
the authors don't spell out their view on what it all means, they conclude with
a couple of telling vignettes: On July 1, 2004, in a ceremony at the South
Carolina Capitol in Columbia, Essie Mae's name was engraved on a monument to
Thurmond alongside those of his white children. Shortly thereafter, this proud,
black woman—who, like her father, exhibits Edgefield boldness—applied for
membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Old
times may not be forgotten in the land of cotton, but thanks to Strom and Essie
Mae, new times are sure enough different.

Steve Oney, author of And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of
Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank
(Vintage), is a senior writer at Los Angeles magazine.

Until I read Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame , I thought that my lowest moment as an author qualified me for some sympathy. After all, I spent two excruciating hours at a Barnes & Noble in Charleston, S.C., as hordes of customers ignored a table neatly stacked with copies of my just-published work on an infamous, anti-Semitic lynching in Georgia. The eventual appearance of a professor of Jewish studies from a local college saved me-he bought a book. Still, that godsend couldn't dispel the shame, which followed me out into the parking lot and down the highway to my next gig.

This experience notwithstanding, I now understand that my brush with literary abasement was mild. No one mooned me, as someone once did Robin Robertson, the editor of Mortification , as he was giving a reading. Nor did I soil myself, as the poet Paul Farley once did. Unlike the novelist Darryl Pinckney, I was not accused by a bookstore clerk of shoplifting my own book just before an event. Nor did I undergo the near-death experience suffered by the novelist Carl Hiaasen, who arrived at a shop in Little Rock for an appearance only to find that it coincided with a University of Arkansas football game. "Nobody ever showed to hear me read," Mr. Hiaasen relates. "So I didn't."

It's grimmer out there than I'd realized. And big-name writers aren't immune. Of the 70 horror stories Mr. Robertson presents in Mortification , many come from luminaries, among them Margaret Atwood, Rick Moody and Billy Collins. Ms. Atwood and Mr. Moody tell of incidents that occurred early in their careers. Still, neither success nor maturity insulates writers from pride-puncturing mishaps. Mr. Robertson believes he understands why: "The world of letters" seems "to offer a near perfect microclimate for embarrassment and shame …. Something about the presentation of deeply private thoughts-carefully worked and honed into art over the years-to a public audience of strangers … strays perilously close to tragedy."

Predictably, a river of alcohol runs through Mortification . But drink is merely a force multiplier in situations that are daunting even to the sober. Though a writer can get his comeuppance almost anywhere (the novelist Alan Warner was laid low in his own home by a well-meaning but poorly informed neighbor who knocked on his door and asked him to inscribe a book by the other Alan Warner-the guitar player), three settings provide optimal opportunity for humiliation.

The most obvious danger zone is the book tour-where, in the words of the novelist Deborah Moggach, "the gulf between promise and reality" is "never wider." She should know. At an appearance in northern England, she failed to sell a single copy of a new book, despite the fact that the shop that had invited her offered a free glass of wine and a bar of Crabtree and Evelyn soap with every purchase. As bad as that sounds, Andrew O'Hagan can top it. On tour for The Missing , a nonfiction meditation on missing persons, he had the misfortune to appear on Good Morning Chicago . During the interview, "the cables on the floor raised up like snakes" as the photogenic but dim host continually referred to Mr. O'Hagan as the author of a book on grandparents.

Peril also lurks at lectures and readings. The novelist Michael Ondaatje tells the story of an unnamed writer (in this book, such discretion feels unduly prim) who in the midst of a talk sensed she was about to vomit. Hoping to maintain her dignity, she excused herself on the pretext of retrieving some notes from backstage, then rushed to the ladies' room, where she wretched violently. She was still hugging the porcelain when her host knocked on the door to inform her that she'd failed to detach her microphone-the audience had heard it all. Once more, however, another author takes the prize. A couple of lines into a reading, the poet Matthew Sweeney "felt the horrible sensation of my tooth loosening in my mouth." With artful "flicks of the tongue," he held the molar in place, although the effort caused him to lisp, which brought unintended laughter from the crowd. Still, Mr. Sweeney pressed on until, halfway through a poem rife with sibilance, he accidentally spit his tooth into the front row. The gig ended with a remark that belongs in the lost-dignity hall of fame: "Give me my tooth back."

The awards ceremony stands out as the occasion when authors risk the worst abasement. Here, embarrassment can give way to its nastier cousin-ego damage. Every writer has to believe that he's brilliant; otherwise, he can't face the empty page. Thus, to sit in a packed hall while others walk away with the ribbons is to experience a kind of torture. Little wonder that some of the most painful segments of Mortification involve prizes-or the lack thereof. In a beautifully written set piece, the novelist Anne Enright describes making a long drive from Dublin to a town in County Kerry, all the while rehearsing her acceptance speech for the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers' Week Prize for Irish Fiction. Such earnest preparation can only be rewarded with one outcome-failure. Ms. Enright's unflinching account of the devastation she felt upon not hearing her name called is a small gem.

The effect of reading threescore and 10 such stories is, in the end, a bit numbing. I imagine that's why Robin Robertson included a skeptical rumination from the novelist Duncan McLean: "The true mortification of being a writer is having to meet other writers from time to time and listen to their mundane egotistical rantings."

The many disasters in Mortification also raise a question: Isn't there a better way for authors to reach an audience? The last word on this point should go to the novelist John Lanchester. "The truth is that the whole contemporary edifice of readings and tours and interviews and festivals is based on a mistake," he argues. "The mistake is that we should want to meet the writers that we admire, because there is something more to them in person than there is on the page …. The idea is that the person is the real thing, whereas the writing is somehow an excrescence or epiphenomenon. But that's not true …. The failure to see this reality is the reason why book events are so prone to go wrong."

That said, Mr. Lanchester adds: "I feel strongly on the point-just not strongly enough to put the belief into practice. Everyone else does it …. What's the worst that can happen?"

Plenty! And the yarn Mr. Lanchester proceeds to tell about what happened to him one night at a publishing event in London proves it.

Steve Oney is the author of And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (Pantheon).