New York: The Literary Guild, 1934. Hardcover - A book which was both a best seller and a classic account of 1920s Alabama, part memoir, part history, and part cultural analysis. In 1921, Carmer accepted a position at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Carmer discovered that the people of Alabama offered many interesting stories, especially those from a Sumter County woman named Ruby Pickens Tartt, who related numerous tales she had heard from the rural African American tenant farmers in her home town of Livingston. His first section, Tuscaloosa Nights, describes his arrival in Tuscaloosa by train, his trip to his hotel, and a meeting with a fellow faculty member and an old friend from Harvard and several of his associates. Late that first night, another professor whom he immediately liked told him bluntly to get out of the state before it was too late. For six years, Carmer travelled to every corner of the state and kept copious notes, on Ku Klux Klan parades, foot-washings, and voodoo rituals.and later turned them into this book (the title refers to an 1833 meteor event that appeared as a shower of stars falling on the countryside.) Illustrated by Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge. Map frontispiece. Includes a section titled 'from the Author's Notebook" which lists dozens of Fiddlers' Tunes, Mattie Sue's quilt patterns, All-Day Singing, Mountain Superstitions, Big House, Negro Superstitions, The Sims War, and Brer Rabbit Multiplies. 294 pp. Illustrated endpapers.