PERRY MANN

Perry Earl Mann was born on the 12th day of March 1921, in a cottage on Russell St. in Charleston, West Virginia, to a young couple who had left the country for the city after World War I. He lived there during the "Roaring Twenties," that time when men gambled recklessly on the market and women cut their hair, shortened their skirts and took to cigarettes.

The Great Depression quieted the roar and brought financial wreck to his family. But it was a disguised blessing in that it caused Perry to have to leave Charleston and live with his grandparents on a farm near Hinton, West Virginia, where he learned to work and to live intimately with nature.

Perry enlisted in the Army Air Corps three days after Pearl Harbor. During the four years he spent in the army, he began to integrate himself and to focus on what he wanted to do with his life. The GI Bill allowed him to attend Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where he acquired a degree in the liberal arts and met Plato, Tolstoy, Dickens, et al.

Perry taught in the public schools of Virginia, until he was summarily fired for writing letters to the editor raging against Virginia's racist reaction to court-ordered desegregation of its public schools. He eventually returned to Washington and Lee and acquired a law degree, and in 1972, settled in Hinton, West Virginia, to practice law.

As the consequence of a life-long friendship with a comrade who inherited a weekly newspaper in Nicholas County, West Virginia, Perry began in 1992 to write a column for the Nicholas Chronicle. A friend collected some of the columns and prefaced them thusly:

"Perry Mann is among the most thoughtful, informed and articulate progressive thinkers and writers in America today. He writes deeply on wide-ranging issues, including politics, ecology, history, economics, civil rights, religion, philosophy, and rural life. He has produced what may be the most cogent collection of critiques of the Religious Right to ever appear in this country."

Mann family Perry Mann with son Jeff and daughter Amy
on the Mann farm in Summers County, West Virginia.