William Terry Couch and the Politics of Academic Publishing: An Editor's Career as Lightning Rod for Controversy

William Terry Couch (1901-1988) began his four-decade publishing career building the University of North Carolina Press into one of the nation's leading university presses. His editorial attacks on the social ills of the South earned him a reputation as a southern liberal. By the 1940s, his disaffection with New Deal politics turned him toward the right, resulting in his 1950 firing as director of the University of Chicago Press.

As a conservative, Couch sought books and articles that woul...