“A Plague of Bulldozers: Celestine Sibley and Suburban Sprawl,” Southern Spaces (March 2009).  

Using murder mysteries to address what she saw as destructive, rather than progressive, forces coming from the city into the countryside of north Fulton County, Georgia, journalist and fiction writer Celestine Sibley (1914-1999) attempted to present the city of Atlanta and the region beyond it as antithetical. Sibley’s once beloved city had come to represent the forces of greed and capitalism encroaching upon what she viewed as the rural simplicity and goodness of country living. However, these novels in effect reveal the two ideologically separate spatial entities as connected within the broader economic processes of late-twentieth-century urban sprawl and within broader historical patterns of race relations in the Atlanta metropolitan region.