Just as I Am? Marshall Frady's Making of Billy Graham

Literary journalists have a dual role that more or less inevitably presents a moral problem. They must establish a relationship with their subject, and then must shift their attention and loyalty to their art-the writing of the work. Marshall Frady (1940-2004), a journalist with a zeal for the literary side of the balance that drew on Southern writers such as Faulkner and Agee, published evocative profiles of numerous subjects in national magazines and novelistic biographies. Nowhere was the moral problem more troubling than when Frady, the son of a Southern Baptist preacher, took on world-renowned evangelist Billy Graham in a biography he spent at least five years working on. The following paper is based on Frady's personal papers, recently acquired by Emory University in an IRS auction.