American General derives most of its premiums from life and health policies sold primarily in the rural Southeast.

Within the United States, infection is rare overall but may be common in the rural Southeast, where 2.2 million people are thought to be infected.

That's no small image rehab for a sport that began in the rural Southeast, on small dirt tracks usually bulldozed out of someone's farmland.

LEAD: Because of an editing error, an article in Business Day yesterday about a proxy fight being waged by the Torchmark Corporation for seats on the board of the American General Corporation referred incorrectly to the company that derives most of its premiums from life and health policies sold primarily in the rural Southeast.

But to gain access to the bright lights, Nascar may have to pay less attention to the land that sustained it through hard times: the rural Southeast.

But stock-car racing, then confined to the rural Southeast, suffered from two plagues: rampant cheating, and race promoters who ran off with the prize money.

"The rural Southeast is a much less forgiving environment in which to drive than, say, Arizona or Iowa," said Simon Washington, a civil engineering professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who recently studied the region's high fatality rate.

In "Coming Up Down Home: A Memoir of a Southern Childhood," Mr. Brown has now turned to his early experiences in the rural Southeast in the 1940's and 50's.