Originally launched in the late 1930s, the Southern Biography Series of the Louisiana State University Press has a long and venerable tradition. The first editors, Wendall Holmes Stevenson and Fred C. Cole, were succeeded in 1950 by T. Harry Williams, who edited the series for thirty years. William J. Cooper, Jr., was series editor from 1980 to 1994, when Bertram Wyatt-Brown began his tenure. Mr. Wyatt-Brown retired from the series in 2009 to concentrate on his own writing. Notable titles from the twentieth century include P. G. T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray by T. Harry Williams, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery by Drew Gilpin Faust, Mary Boykin Chesnut by Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, General Edmund Kirby Smith, C.S.A. by Joseph H. Parks, and Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest by K. Jack Bauer.