Middle American radical: Samuel Francis (1947-2005).(Obituary)(Biography)

Viewed from Australia, the vigour, range, craftsmanship, and depth of America's magazine culture at its most intelligent all form a continual pleasure, far surpassing anything the local product has to offer. The only problem with this abundance is that authorial competition to attract global fame is dreadfully acute.

Therefore a mere handful of American magazine authors become at all familiar abroad, and their wider renown occurs at the expense of other authors with equal if not greater talents. This is the most evident (though not the sole) explanation for the obscurity in which Samuel Francis, who died on 15 February 2005 when only fifty-seven years old, remains outside the United States. A formidably effective stylist at his best--and one whose courage even his numerous enemies had to concede--Francis serves as a microcosm of modern intellectual history, in his early rise, abrupt fall, and incomplete but extremely gratifying rehabilitation.

Some commentators have observed that worthwhile American literature is entirely the product of Southerners and Jews. Certainly Francis's career does nothing to invalidate this assumption. Born on 29 April 1947, Samuel Todd Francis first acquired a following among his fellow graduate students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. (North Carolina's unofficial nickname is "The Tarheel State"; one well-wisher--Walker Percy, the novelist--called Francis's circle "The Tarheel Conspiracy". (1)) Francis emerged during what we can now recognise as the last hurrah of Confederate intellectual life: the early 1970s, before the politics of self-abnegation had turned the Southern States' academia into, by all accounts, an even more absurd instance of rampant thought-policing than its Yankee counterpart. With this Confederate background went, in Francis's case, a passionate concern for British history: this concern being rare among Americans, whose besetting ideological vices--especially before Blair became a transatlantic fashion-plate--have been apt to include Anglophobia. (Theodore Dreiser's wartime denunciation of Britain as "a nation of horseriding snobs"--to which Orwell sardonically retorted "Forty-six million horse-riding snobs!"--illustrates an all too widespread American delusion.)

Characteristically, Francis devoted his doctoral thesis to the Earl of Clarendon and other leading figures of seventeenth-century English political life, a milieu that he found much more vivid and (dread adjective) relevant than…