Thomas Hal Phillips  1922-2007
Major Works
Books
- The Loved and the Unloved
- The Golden Lie
- Search for a Hero
- The Bitterweed Path
- Kangeroo Hollow
- Red Midnight
Movies
- Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
- Walking Tall II
- O. C. and Stiggs
- Ode to Billy Joe
- Tarzan's Fight for Life
- Huckleberry Finn
- The Brain Machine
- Minstrel Man
- Nightmare in Badham County
- Nashville
Short Stories
- "Lone Bridge"
- "Mostly in the Fields"
- "The Shadow of an Arm"
- "A Touch of Earth"
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Thomas Hal Phillips:
A Biography
By Matthew Rowe (SHS)
 Thomas
Hal Phillips was born on October 11, 1922, on an old farm near
Corinth, Mississippi, to W. T. Phillips and Ollie Fare
Phillips. He was one of six children (Lloyd 370) and attended
Alcorn Agricultural High School near the town of Corinth or
Kossuth, where he lives today. There he wrote for the
school paper, played football, and argued for the debate team.
After his graduation from high school, he went to Mississippi
State College and majored in social science. He graduated
with a B. S. degree from Mississippi State College in
Starkville, Mississippi, in 1943 and served with the United
States Navy as a lieutenant (junior grade . during the
Second World War. After leaving the military, he studied
creative writing at the University of Alabama, receiving an
M. A. in 1948 (Lloyd 371).
While at the University of Alabama, Thomas Hal Phillips wrote
The Bitterweed Path as his thesis for his master’s
degree. It is a coming of age story and this became his
first published book. Published in 1950, this book has
been successful and is considered to be very well written. His
next book, The Golden Lie, was published in 1951.
It has not been as successful as The Bitterweed Path,
because, according to some critics, it is
not as complex as The Bitterweed Path. In
1952, Search for a Hero was published and won
critical acclaim. His next book, called Kangaroo
Hollow, was first published in England in 1954, and
only recently (2000) has been published in America. In
1955 his last book The
Loved and the Unloved was published to
mixed reviews. It also has been reprinted just recently
in this country. Phillips is about to publish a new
book called Red Midnight, about a young boy in
the South who has lost his mother (Phillips).
From 1948 until 1950 Phillips taught creative writing
at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. After publishing
his five books, he became the Public Service Commissioner
of the northern district of Mississippi, following his brother
in the position. He served in this position until he resigned
to manage his brother Rubel Lex Phillips's unsuccessful campaign
bid for governor of Mississippi (Lloyd 371).
 Since
the sixties, Thomas Hal Phillips has worked on numerous screenplays
-- primarily as a writer but also in non-writer positions.
Among the films that he has worked on are Roll of Thunder,
Hear My Cry, Tarzan’s Fight for Life, Huckleberry Finn,
Minstrel Man, The Brain Machine, Nightmare in Badham County,
Walking Tall II, Buffalo Bill, and Ode to Billy
Joe. He also worked on the Emmy Award winning Autobiography
of Miss Jane Pittman. Furthermore, he has been associated
with Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us, California
Split, and Nashville, for which he created
and then played the part of a presidential
candidate named Hal Phillip Walker, whose voice is heard but
whose face is never seen on screen (Phillips).
Also in his Hollywood career, Phillips served
as executive producer, associate producer and location scout.
Several of Thomas Hal Phillips’s short stories
received critical notice. The short story “Mostly
in the Fields” (Virginia Quarterly Review, 27 [1951],
546-55) became part of his book Search for a Hero. “A
Touch of Earth” (Southwest Review, 34 [1949], 340-47)
was included in Martha Foley’s Best American Short
Stories of 1949. “The Shadow of an
Arm” (Virginia Quarterly Review, 16 [1950], 578-86) was
one of the O. Henry Prize Stories of 1951, and “Lone
Bridge” was published in the Southwest Review, 36 [1951],
104-10) (Lloyd 372). From 1947 to 1953 Phillips received several
grants including the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in fiction,
the Eugend F. Saxton Award, the Fulbright Fellowship and a Guggenheilm
Fellowship as well as the O. Henry Prize for a short story mentioned
above.
Thomas Hal Phillips continued to live in Corinth, Mississippi,
until his death in 2007. His last book, Red Midnight,
was published in 2002.
A Review of The
Loved and The Unloved
by Matthew Rowe (SHS)
The Loved and the Unloved by Thomas Hal Phillips
is a very well-written book about a boy coming of age and of
his crime. Phillips keeps the reader in suspense
with his great ability to foreshadow impending events.
It is a book filled with insights and descriptions that will
keep you reading until the very end. The Loved and
the Unloved relates the story of a crippled, teen-age
boy named Max Hopper, who lives on a tenet farm in Mississippi
in the early 1900’s. There is much tension between Max
and the Vance Acroft, the son of the owner of the large farm
on which Max's parents are sharecroppers. The story
is told in the first person by Max as he sits in prison on death
row. Phillips builds the suspense as a horse kills Max's
brother on the Acroft's farm. Once his brother is killed,
Max's father tries to sue Mr. Acroft because the boy was killed
in Acroft's barn. However, the lawsuit fails, and
Max's father leaves, leaving Max to take care of the family.
Out of necessity, Max goes to work at the sawmill to earn money.
Max likes the landlord's daughter, and she appears to like him
despite their obvious social/class differences. . However,
things happen which lead to a terrible crime.
As the compassionate executioner commits suicide to avoid executing
the unloved , the reader is caught in the tragic story.
You will have to find more out for yourself by reading the
Love and the Unloved.
I liked this book because of the great detail and insight.
The insight that Max receives from Mr. ten Hoor, an elderly
man at the place Max’s mother works, shows how older people
can show the way to enlightenment to young people, and how young
people take it. The detail that Thomas Hal Phillips uses
when the characters react to events in their lives adds
meaning to the book and helps you to understand what is going
on and prepares you for what may happen.
I think that this book is for everyone and should be read by
almost everyone. Nevertheless, someone who reads this book needs
some degree of maturity because of some violence and racial
issues.This book shows how people used to be and what their
actions caused.This would be a good book for someone to learn
from and to see how people of the South have changed from the
early 1900’s and how far we have or have not come in today’s
society.
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An Interview
with Thomas Hal Phillips
by Matthew Rowe (SHS), April 21, 2001
“When did you start writing?”
“I really don’t really know. I
started very early--ten or eleven years old. It just
appealed to me, so I just started writing.”
“What inspired you to write?” 
“ My English teacher, who was a creative writer,
he had a group of five or six students that he taught on the
side, and then he worked with them. That was my
biggest inspiration early on when I was 14 or 15 years old.”
“What book inspires you the most?”
“’Look Homeward Angel’
by Thomas Wolfe, my favorite American novelist.”
“What book would you recommend teens to read?”
Read the great writers in American
and French. If you’re fourteen to fifteen years
old , then you should read those books.”
“Did you like doing Nashville?”
“Yes, I did like doing that.
I did the political part of that.”
 “How
much time did you spend on that?”
“I was associate producer,
but I was not carried as that but I really was. I did
location and casting and a lot of things.
It was February in Nashville, and then in May we stayed there
until September. It was quite a long stay for us.”
“What is your favorite movie that you have worked on?”
“Nashville was my favorite.”
Photo: Researcher Matthew Rowe
“What was your favorite part of it?”
“Well, I played the presidential
candidate. It gave me a real important part; that’s
why I like it so much.”
“You think you’ll do any more writing?”
“Yea, I got a book that’s at the publisher's
now.”
“What’s the name for it?”
“Red Midnight.”
“What is it about?”
“It's set in Alcorn County.
It’s about a little boy. It’s about a youngster
whose mother was a French bride and whose father
was an American. It’s the story of him.”
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Related
Websites
This
site contains a a summary of Red Midnight
by Thomas Hal Phillips.
Summary
of The Loved and the Unloved by Phillips.
This site discusses Kangaroo Hollow by Thomas
Hal Phillips.
Thomas
Hal Phillips, a Mississippi State graduate, novelist and screenwriter
for "Nashville" and The Biography of Miss Jane Pittman"
to come to Literary Festival.
RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
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Bibliography
Hurley, Cheryl. "Thomas Hal Phillips." Corinth Information
Database. 24 October 1992. Available HTTP: www.tsixroads.com/corinthMLSANDY?mw004.html
Lloyd, James B., Ed. Lives of Mississippi Authors. 2827-2967.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1981.370-372.
Phillips, Thomas Hal. Personal phone interview. 21 April 2001.
"Thomas Hal Phillips Corinth, Mississippi.” Shop Mississippi.
Online. Internet. 1
April 2001. Available HTTP: www.Shopmississippi.com/thomashalphillips.html
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