Robert LeRoy Phillips, Jr., received his Ph. D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1971, having written his dissertation on the works of four nineteenth-century Georgia writers - Augustus B. Longstreet, William Tappan Thompson, Richard Malcolm Johnston, and Joel Chandler Harris. He joined the English department at Mississippi State University in 1971, and became bookreview editor of the Mississippi Quarterly in 1973. In 1976 he was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. As codirector for the Mississippi library Commission's project "Mississippi Writers in Context," a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (1975-1977), Phillips designed and coedited a six-segment television series on Mississippi's authors, A Climate for Genius (1975), edited written transcripts of the series, compiled and edited a collection of antebellum Mississippi short stories, and written introductory booklets on the works of Shelby Foote and Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples.
