When I wrote Peachtree Road, slightly more than ten years ago, I was aware, even in the first of its pages, that I was writing a bittersweet love song to a place that would cease to exist before the book was published. It has always been the nature of Atlanta to change like a chameleon, to be gone somewhere else entirely before the eye and the heart could hold it. It has been a city on the make and on the move all its young life, and the great arc of its trajectory has carried with it an incalculable number of vigorous, eccentric and none-too-principled men and women, among whose number were a handful who literally reinvented the city and the South in the short, supercharged decade of the Sixties. It was these men and women that I wanted to write about, and it was their home and their city I wanted to catch for myself and posterity before they, too, were gone into the sun.
A writer is never sure if he or she has succeeded with a book, or even what “succeed” means, but I do know that Peachtree Road opened a new door for me, one that led me to a world I might never have known. I like to think perhaps I was, in turn, able to introduce Atlanta to them. It was and is an Atlanta as surely gone with the wind as the one young Margaret Mitchell wrote of more than sixty years earlier, but to me, no less beautiful and seductive than that one.
My particular Atlanta, too, is nearly gone now, but I like knowing that I can find it anytime I want to revisit it, in these pages. It gave sweetness and shape to my first youth, and I will always think of it as Shep Bondurant did, in these words: “Peachtree Road…it is to me a name with far more scope and resonance than its dozen or so meandering miles of asphalt should rightly command…. Admittedly I see it now through the scrim of youth, but I do not think it looks like anywhere else on earth, and the very name of it rings in my heart like a bell.”
—Anne Rivers Siddons
February 4, 1998
Atlanta