In

   Heaven

 

Alumnus William B. Hedgepeth ’63C rejoices in the rerelease
of his compendium of porcine prose

By Greg Fulton

 

THE HOG BOOK, a scholarly, fanciful, and sometimes lyrical paean to pigs by William B. Hedgepeth ’63C recently returned to bookshelves after seventeen years out of print.

Praised in the Congressional Recordin 1978, excerpted in the Utne Readerin 1998 (and in Emory Magazinein 1991), The Hog Bookhas nuzzled its way between Charlotte’s Weband Babein the pantheon of pork.

The New York Timescalled the work a “fey and remarkably informative tribute” when it was originally published by Doubleday in 1978. By 1981, sales of the book had surpassed one hundred thousand.

The 288-page book covers everything from the genealogy and language of the species to its inclusion in Greek and Jewish mythology; its role in history, art, and show business; and the growing scientific use of hog organs in human transplantation. The text runs the gamut from vivid slaughterhouse detail to the poetry of W. B. Yeats and hog haiku.

“People really don’t know that hogs are second only to higher primates in terms of intellience and were the first animals taught to do circus tricks,” says Hedgepeth. “They’re very protective, . . . and their sense of smell is keener than dogs’. If people came to see pigs in terms of their potential, they’d never return to seeing them as fat, stupid, and ugly—all the demeaning prejudices that allow us to eat them.”

				Articles on Native Americans, Appalachian poverty, and Southern politics earned William B. Hedgepeth ’63C an array of national journalism awards, and a 1967 story on starvation in Mississippi was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Hedgepeth’s writing career began while majoring in humanities at Emory and editing the student-run Phoenixfrom 1961 to 1963, when the quarterly publication became known for its constant parodies of Emory administrators and faculty.

A few days before graduation, Hedgepeth was involved in a near-fatal car accident. He was comatose for several weeks and lost sight in his left eye, which is now covered with an eye patch. (“You know, I’ve found that no matter where you go around the entire world, children always know what a pirate is,” he says.)

After he recovered, Hedgepeth began writing for the Atlanta Journal,then became a speechwriter for Georgia Governor Carl Sanders. In 1966, he managed the successful Congressional campaign of W. S. “Bill” Stuckey from Georgia’s eighth district. It was during that campaign that Hedgepeth met his first pig.

“We were out on [Stuckey’s] farm doing some campaign photos, and some hogs started charging me, and I jumped up on the fence and started snapping pictures of them,” he says. “A couple of years later in Tennessee, having been awakened to hogs, I’d take pictures along the road, and they’d start arranging themselves and posing. I became aware of their intelligence, so I called my publisher and said I wanted to do a book about hogs.”

Hedgepeth joined Lookin 1967, first as an assistant editor in New York, then as senior editor and Southeastern bureau chief in Atlanta, where he penned hard-hitting stories on the social conditions of the late sixties and the not-yet-New South. Articles on Native Americans, Appalachian poverty, and Southern politics earned him an array of national journalism awards, which in turn led to assignments ranging from coverage of the brutal war in Biafra to a profile of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s dog Yuki. A 1967 story on starvation in Mississippi was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. A West Coast trip that same year for an article titled “Inside the Hippie Revolution” became the basis for his first book, The Alternative: Communal Life in New America,published in 1970 by MacMillan.