Word: dryness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...when he published The Moviegoer, it was clear that Walker Percy had emerged as the first major Southern voice in 30 years entirely free of the Faulknerian inflection. That in itself was good news. Yet the particular glories of the book were a tone of voice that combined modern dryness and irony with an almost wanton tenderness, and a languid young hero who drifted from years of daydreaming about love to a gradual awareness of the real thing. Percy's second novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), was also about a vague young man, this one afflicted with occasional amnesia...
...fungus disease. It eats through the tender leaves of young plants, causes weakened stalks to collapse and, at worst, turns ears of corn into blackened rot. Called Southern-corn leaf blight, the fungus has long been confined to the South because its wind-borne spores do not survive the dryness of northern summers. Last year a new and more deadly mutant strain of the leaf blight appeared, and this year it spread north from Florida and Georgia. Farmers use chemical sprays to protect sweet table corn from the fungus, but spraying weekly and after every rain is too costly...