Southern Literature

[lionel]

I'm testing things here, as I don't have any answers, only questions to a vast and diverse literary subject of which I'm merely a student. I don't like repeating myself too much, but many of my posts over the last few months here have concerned Southern literature, by which I mean the literature of the American South (and I capitalize that word as I think it's important to do so). What is the South? It depends on your perceptions, your ideology, etc, but after the obvious Texas (or is that in the south-west?), Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, where else do we include? Personally, I don't care, as long as there's a very strong Southern element (whatever that means) in a work. So, welcome Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, even West Virginia, Missouri and Maryland, and how about splitting states and including the extreme south of Illinois? It ain't easy, but nor is it easy to find the borders of, er, Southern mentality. And what does that mean? I don't know, which is why I'm just feeling my way around the subject. Sure, I could go to theses and books, but they might mislead me. But I'm certain that key issues in Southern fiction involve history, race, gender, sexuality, power, etc., in a way that the northern, central, and western states have never encountered. Southern literature, despite the warmer weather, seems to have extra layers of clothing, which makes it all the more fascinating to explore. What works am I talking about? This is where I repeat myself in order to gather posts to make things clearer, but in such a vast subject we have to begin with lists:

A few months ago, judges of Oxford American, a quarterly journal of the University of Central Arkansas, voted on the ten best Southern novels. Their verdict:

1. William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
2. Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men
3. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
4. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
5. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Walker Percy's The Moviegoer
7. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
8. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
9. Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood
10. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

The Southern books I've enjoyed reading most over the last year are:

Agee, James, Death in the Family

Berry, Wendell A World Lost (Like being introduced to a new world by the aged Kentucky farming guru of the environmentalists)

Brown, Larry, Dirty Work

Chesnutt, Charles W., The Marrow of Tradition

Dickey, James, Poems

Edgerton, Clyde Walking Across Egypt (Deceptively simple, very slightly crazy, but full of human warmth for the eccentric and the outsider)

Gaines, Ernest J., A Lesson before Dying (Wonderful, but you have to persevere. The end is tear-jerking)

Glasgow, Ellen, Virginia

Kelley, Edith Summers, Weeds

Mason, Bobbie Ann, In Country

Newman, Frances, The Hard-Boiled Virgin (Wonderful stuff, but not to everyone's taste as there are no paragraphs and the sentences seem endless, often with double or triple negatives)

Percy, Walker, The Moviegoer

Porter, Katherine Anne, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Price, Reynolds A Long and Happy Life,

Siddons, Anne Rivers, Peachtree Road (Yes, seriously - a really good book about a spunky version of a Southern Lady. Don't let the cover put you off.)

Smith, Lillian, Strange Fruit (brilliant 1944 novel originally banned in Boston until Eleanor Roosevelt intervened - concerns a mixed race sexual relationship)

Willingham, Calder, Rambling Rose

Grace Lumpkin's To Make My Bread, about the destruction of Appalachian culture and the 1929 Gastonia mill strike, looks promising, although I'm not halfway through it.

Disappointments: Harry Crews, Erskine Caldwell, Barry Hannah, Sidney Lanier, Byron Herbert Reece.

To be read (if only because already bought, and all are by Southern authors): Olive Dargan's Call Home the Heart, Olive Ann Burns's Cold Sassy Tree, Lee Smith's On Agate Hill,Frances Newman's Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers.

More to follow. I've just finished updating my blog of my recent driving tour, in which there are many photos and many details of 31 literary sites, all in Southern states:

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[ferns_dad]

again, I'd say some of Faulkner's shorter works are pretty great, I always liked Sanctuary as having one of the most evil and foreboding feelings to it, and in the same vein, Cormac McCarthy is actually southern, and some of his earlier works took place down there. (Orchard Keeper, Stonemason, Child of God)

 

[Daniel del Real]

again, I'd say some of Faulkner's shorter works are pretty great, I always liked Sanctuary as having one of the most evil and foreboding feelings to it, and in the same vein, Cormac McCarthy is actually southern, and some of his earlier works took place down there. (Orchard Keeper, Stonemason, Child of God)

Yep I was about to mention Cormac McCarthy who deals with situations happening in the south and the borders. I don't know if you consider him Southern or you go to a more specific branch about Border literature, where topics like immigration and violence are always present, just like in McCarthy's stories. However Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men are great examples.

 

[lionel]

Yep I was about to mention Cormac McCarthy who deals with situations happening in the south and the borders. I don't know if you consider him Southern or you go to a more specific branch about Border literature, where topics like immigration and violence are always present, just like in McCarthy's stories. However Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men are great examples.

Yes, Daniel, Cormac McCarthy is about to be mentioned (Southern is vast, it contains multitudes), although I don't think any of the books you speak of are in the list because, great as they are, they can look after themselves.

 

[lionel]

This is the list of Southern books considered 'underrated' by Oxford American of the University of Central Arkansas a few months ago. I'm sure no one will agree about all of these inclusions, but they present a brilliant working area from which to consider (often neglected works of) Southern literature. I've edited the list a little so as to exclude non-fiction as far as I could, although some may well have slipped through the net due to excess of alcohol, or just plain ignorance, on my part. They're in chronological order. So where's Selah Saterstrom's The Pink Institution, or Chris Fuhrman's The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys,you may well ask. Ah, they're in another list: this field is endless.

Of interesting note, too, is that a few works of southern Appalachian literature (a sub-genre of Southern literature) are included here, and it's fascinating to remember that prominent Southern writer Lee Smith once said that southern Appalachia is to the South what the South is to the rest of the US: it's all about poverty-stricken outsiders, you see, but them hillbillies are really at the bottom of the heap: they only make and drink moonshine, fuck their cousins, and fight. For the 19th century, that'll come in a bit, but in the meantime let the band play on:

THE RECORDING ANGEL (1912)
by Corra Harris
“A fine twentieth-century American comic work that needs rediscovery.”
—Peter Schmidt

LOVERS OF LOUISIANA (TO-DAY) (1918)
by George Washington Cable

THE TIME OF MAN (1926)
by Elizabeth Madox Roberts
“Roberts was a master stylist who refused to self promote. This particular book looks closely at the life circumstances of a young woman, a tenant farmer, who finds ways to speak her spirit in a world that cannot hear.” —Chris Green

SARTORIS (1929)
by William Faulkner
“So full of drama and pathos. Yes, the language is missing the grandeur of As I Lay Dying—“a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth”—but the layers of plot and character weave an intricate, textured tapestry, foreshadowing things to come.”
—Catherine Clinton

THE WAVE (1929)
by Evelyn Scott

TO MAKE MY BREAD (1932)
by Grace Lumpkin

THE SHELTERED LIFE (1932)
by Ellen Glasgow

GONE WITH THE WIND (1936)
by Margaret Mitchell
“Gone With the Wind—the novel, not the film—is no Southern romance, either for the antebellum or postbellum South. The most effectual characters are of yeoman rather than aristocratic stock, and Mitchell’s portrait of New South Atlanta is a devastating critique.”
—James Cobb

RIVER OF EARTH (1940)
by James Still
“One of the finest Appalachian novels ever written—an Appalachian Grapes of Wrath in which the crops fail and the mines close and the Baldwin family sets out from place to place in a rattletrap car looking for work. For me as a writer, this novel was absolutely crucial. I picked it up by chance in a library when I was in college, and after one paragraph, I was hooked. I sat down in the library and read the entire novel straight through, then burst into tears and read it again. Not only was the setting familiar to me—the mountains of my childhood, my own country—but the Appalachian dialect was the way I had first heard language. I had no idea that it could be literature as well. Years later, when I went to teach at the writers’ workshop at the Hindman Settlement School in Eastern Kentucky, I was privileged to know James Still himself, not only a novelist but also a fine poet and short story writer who lived all his life in a log house at the Forks of Troublesome Creek.”
—Lee Smith

GO DOWN, MOSES (1940)
by William Faulkner

THE GREAT BIG DOORSTEP (1941)
by E.P. O’Donnell
“Eudora Welty also claimed it was an underappreciated classic.”
—Joseph Flora

HOLD AUTUMN IN YOUR HAND (1941)
by George Sessions Perry
“The best sharecropping novel set in that Southern part of Texas known as East Texas. A warm and excellent portrait of rural Southern life during the Great Depression.”
—Don Graham

CROSS CREEK (1942)
by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (1946)
by Carson McCullers
“I have recently read commentary that the novel, and the play based on the novel, are dated because of the relationships between the races—it is set in late ’40s Georgia. But, although the novel contains themes of race relations, and the tragedy of them, the achingly universal feature of the novel is its rendering of a young girl’s loss of childhood, what is left behind, what is lost, in the differentiation of gender that puberty demands. The subject is a soul’s subject: all the action in the novel is symbolic. There is not a single poor sentence in the entire text, not one. And the choices the author makes about what scenes to render and which to leave out are revelatory, daring. The text absolutely shimmers on the page. When I first read this book, I didn’t know such things could be said: The book takes place in a very deep and truthful realm. It is a rare work.”
—Moira Crone

YOUNGBLOOD (1954)
by John O. Killens

A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (1956)
by Nelson Algren
“The book is criminally neglected.”
—William Gay

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (1957)
by James Agee
“In the humble, uneducated opinion of a hillbilly singer with delusions of grandeur, A Death in the Family is powerful and beautiful and very nearly perfect.”
—Steve Earle

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1960)
by Harper Lee
“I know, right? How can a book that has sold a gazillion copies and is taught in countless classrooms every year be considered vastly underrated? I deem it so because somewhere along the way To Kill a Mockingbird was successfully exiled to the Young Adult category.” —Ben George

THE GAY PLACE (1961)
by Billy Lee Brammer

NEGROES WITH GUNS (1962)
by Robert F. Williams

IT IS TIME, LORD (1963)
by Fred Chappell
“Fred Chappell’s first novel, published when he was in his twenties, floored me. Structurally and sentence by sentence, it is a pure-d beauty. Dale Ray Phillips lent me his copy for years, salvaged from the great flood at Hollins University. Inside, someone named Rubin (Louis) had signed his name.”
—Michael Gills

THE KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE (1964)
by Shirley Ann Grau

STONER (1965)
by John Williams

JUBILEE (1966)
by Margaret Walker

OF LOVE AND DUST (1967)
by Ernest J. Gaines
“I read this novel every year, and use it in classes often, and I am always stunned by this entire world recreated in one isolated rural setting, and how an opera of love and hate and revenge is played out in the fields and small houses and dusty roads.”
—Susan Straight

“It is generally considered Gaines's fourth most important novel, but this is the one that is the most fun—it is highly enjoyable and terrifying. Marcus Payne is among the most memorable characters in all of Southern literature, and the novel deserves greater attention than it has received. I am amazed that it has never been made into a major film.”
—Reggie Scott Young

TRUE GRIT (1968)
by Charles Portis

COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI (1968)
by Anne Moody

GERONIMO REX (1970)
by Barry Hannah

THE THIRD LIFE OF GRANGE COPELAND (1970)
by Alice Walker

CHILD OF GOD (1973)
by Cormac McCarthy
“It is by far McCarthy’s most underrated work.” —Keith Lee Morris

NIGHTWATCHMEN (1973)
by Barry Hannah

THE MYSTIC ADVENTURES OF ROXIE STONER (1974)
by Berry Morgan
“Mrs. Morgan’s stories were gems of precision and brevity, and this book about her delightfully zany and spiritual Mississippi woman named Roxie Stoner was a triumph of originality in the tradition of the Christian Existentialists such as Walker Percy.”
—Kenneth Holditch

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (1976)
by Anne Rice
“This book too often gets labeled ‘pop culture fiction’ by those who forget that it was the first major work about vampires to get considerable notice since Dracula. No one captures the lazy decadence of antebellum New Orleans better than Rice, and if you don’t like the thought of vampires, just read it for its piercing rendition of Southern joie de vivre (even among the walking dead).”
—Joy Dickinson Tipping

SUTTREE (1979)
by Cormac McCarthy

BLOOD AND GRITS (1979)
by Harry Crews

RAY (1980)
by Barry Hannah
“This novel hangs in the memory like a fishhook.”
—Harry Crews

HANDLING SIN (1983)
by Michael Malone

THE COURTING OF MARCUS DUPREE (1983)
by Willie Morris
“It contains simply everything that is true about the South: that we hold our football as a blessing and a sacrament of worship; that race, slavery, and political and economic subjugation reach deep inside the crevices of Southern history; that family is the center of life; that church and faith provide daily sustenance; and that the human spirit endures.” —Farrell Evans

DREAMS OF SLEEP (1984)
by Josephine Humphreys

EDISTO (1984)
by Padgett Powell

THE DIXIE ASSOCIATION (1984)
by Donald Hays
“Hays makes us realize that the dregs, the convicts, the undesirables are often on to something everyone else is blindly unaware of. That something is plain and potent truth.” —Matt Baker

MASTERS OF ATLANTIS (1985)
by Charles Portis

A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS (1986)
by Peter Taylor

CAN’T QUIT YOU, BABY (1988)
by Ellen Douglas

JOE (1991)
by Larry Brown

THE KING IS DEAD (1992)
by Sarah Shankman

THE SECRET HISTORY (1992)
by Donna Tartt

WOLF WHISTLE (1993)
by Lewis Nordan

LIVING IN LITTLE ROCK WITH MISS LITTLE ROCK (1993)
by Jack Butler

BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA (1993)
by Dorothy Allison

HELLO DOWN THERE (1993)
by Michael Parker

ON FIRE (1993)
by Larry Brown
“Larry Brown wrote compelling nonfiction, just like his novels and short stories. A product of North Mississippi, he never compromised his vision or took shortcuts in his work. This small volume about his time as a captain at the Oxford, Mississippi fire department explains a man’s journey through manhood, through work, love, danger, and redemption. A copy should be placed in every firehouse in America.” —J.E. Pitts

THE SHARPSHOOTER BLUES (1995)
by Lewis Nordan

EDISTO REVISITED (1996)
by Padgett Powell

THE SWEET EVERLASTING (1996)
by Judson Mitcham

THE KING OF BABYLON SHALL NOT COME AGAINST YOU (1996)
by George P. Garrett

LANCELOT (1997)
by Walker Percy

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS (1997)
by Allan Gurganus

THE HEALING (1998)
by Gayl Jones

JAYBER CROW (2000)
by Wendell Berry

PROVINCES OF NIGHT (2000)
by William Gay
“A wise, spare, hilarious, bighearted tale delivered in language as lovely as the Tennessee hills at dusk.” —Tom Franklin

PRODIGAL SUMMER (2000)
by Barbara Kingsolver

GLASS HOUSE (2001)
by Christine Wiltz
“One of the few urban novels set in the South and a compelling look at race relations in contemporary New Orleans from a variety of perspectives.” —Suzanne Jones

YONDER STANDS YOUR ORPHAN (2001)
by Barry Hannah

WHY DID I EVER? (2001)
by Mary Robison

THE KNOWN WORLD (2003)
by Edward P. Jones
“I’m surprised more people don’t know this writer and specifically this novel—nuanced, complex, beautiful." —Hope Coulter

A THIN DIFFERENCE (2005)
by Frank Turner Hollon

THE ANGEL OF FORGETFULNESS (2005)
by Steve Stern

IF YOU WANT ME TO STAY (2005)
by Michael Parker

WORK SHIRTS FOR MADMEN (2007)
by George Singleton

THE MEAT AND SPIRIT PLAN (2007)
by Selah Saterstrom

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[e joseph]

Nice topic to discuss Lionel. And I wish I were more well-read to be able to comment on the list of books you've tackled this year. Alas, I am not.

Southern books I've enjoyed immensely this year:
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers
Outer Dark - McCarthy

My one question so far, which can be nicely illustrated using McCarthy since his name was tossed into the ring nice and early: Does the Southwest count as Southern? For me, Southern brings to mind the rural Southeast. McCarthy's early books for example (of which I've read only Child of God and Outer Dark) strike me as Southern - they take place in Appalachia - while books like Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men do not.

 

[lionel]

Nice topic to discuss Lionel. And I wish I were more well-read to be able to comment on the list of books you've tackled this year. Alas, I am not.

You can always work on it.

My one question so far, which can be nicely illustrated using McCarthy since his name was tossed into the ring nice and early: Does the Southwest count as Southern?

No, in a concise answer.

For me, Southern brings to mind the rural Southeast.

Spot on. We're talking about a mindset originally based on certain attitudes towards religion, race, gender, sexuality, etc., that have to some extent long disappeared in other American areas, but which remain ingrained in Southern mentality. It's in virtually every Southern book, even if as a rebellion against it, as, for instance, with Carson McCullers. Southern literature, to me, is like looking at things not so much through a different pair of glasses, but with an extra pair, often to be used simultaneously.

McCarthy's early books for example (of which I've read only Child of God and Outer Dark) strike me as Southern - they take place in Appalachia - while books like Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men do not.

Yeah, you're right, I think McCarthy moved south-west (physically and artistically).

 

[e joseph]

You can always work on it.

Good thinking. A Death in the Family has been sitting unread on my shelf for quite some time...

Southern literature, to me, is like looking at things not so much through a different pair of glasses, but with an extra pair, often to be used simultaneously.

Interesting. As for me and my glasses, we're off to get some dinner. Keep the thread rolling, as it's very nice to catch names other than those on the Oxford American list, as great as they are.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Would you consider, In Cold Blood as Southern Literature?. He was born in New Orleans and altough he didn't live much time there, he spent some time in Monroeville Alabama before he was taken at the age of 9 to New York.
In the novel, he depicts the life of the murdered family in Kansas, and the murderers travel to escape from the police.
It's a novel I liked a lot, and that I'd consider to involve a lot of Southern literature in the context Lionel explains.

 

[lionel]

Would you consider, In Cold Blood as Southern Literature?. He was born in New Orleans and altough he didn't live much time there, he spent some time in Monroeville Alabama before he was taken at the age of 9 to New York.
In the novel, he depicts the life of the murdered family in Kansas, and the murderers travel to escape from the police.
It's a novel I liked a lot, and that I'd consider to involve a lot of Southern literature in the context Lionel explains.

This is an interesting question, Daniel, because it's screaming out for some kind of definition of the expression 'Southern literature'. I don't think we should be too dogmatic, and there are bound to be grey areas, but I think Southern literature loses all meaning as a term if it doesn't have the Southern US as its main focus. I don't think a book necessarily has to be set in a Southern area, but its essential content must surely concern the Southern US. So, as I'm aware of no definition of Kansas as a Southern state, I think In Cold Blood has to be excluded. I agree with you that it's a fine book, though.

But the South was certainly a major influence on Capote, which is clearly shown in Other Voices, Other Rooms, and I think I'd call that novel Southern. Interesting too that you mention Monroeville, a charming little town where Capote lived next door to Harper Lee for a time, although Lee's former home is now a fast food shack, Capote's home has been razed to the ground, but the Old Courthouse is there, and to remind us of the town's distinguished citizens, there are a few street markers.

But returning to definition, where do we place the opportunist writer from the north-east, say, who becomes a kind of commercial tourist in the South? Is New York journalist Mary Heaton Vorse's Strike! (1930), one of the six novels written about the Gastonia mill strike in North Carolina, a Southern novel? Similarly, is John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Southern literature? Both books are set exclusively in the South, but to me the books aren't Southern literature because they're not written by people who've grown up in, or at least spent a large amount of time in, the South. Vorse and Berendt just don't have that shared knowledge and psychology that goes with belonging to the South.

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[e joseph]

But returning to definition, where do we place the opportunist writer from the north-east, say, who becomes a kind of commercial tourist in the South? Is New York journalist Mary Heaton Vorse's Strike! (1930), one of the six novels written about the Gastonia mill strike in North Carolina, a Southern novel? Similarly, is John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Southern literature? Both books are set exclusively in the South, but to me the books aren't Southern literature because they're not written by people who've grown up in, or at least spent a large amount of time in, the South. Vorse and Berendt just don't have that shared knowledge and psychology that goes with belonging to the South.

Without prior knowledge that these authors are/were not from the South, could one tell that just by reading the novels?

 

[lionel]

Good thinking. A Death in the Family has been sitting unread on my shelf for quite some time...


Interesting. As for me and my glasses, we're off to get some dinner. Keep the thread rolling, as it's very nice to catch names other than those on the Oxford American list, as great as they are.

A few members of the Fugitive/Agrarian clan haven't been mentioned, I don't think, such as Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, etc.

I wouldn't recommend reading Thomas Nelson Page, or the fascist Thomas Dixon, online, as you might want to do harm to your computer.

There's a wonderful book with about 200 examples of Appalachian women's writing, from local colourist Mary Noailles Murfree of the late 19th century to the modern, popular, romantic Adriana Trigiani of Big Stone Gap fame: Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia, edited by Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia H. Hudson, and published by The University Press of Kentucky.

Also on a more contemporary note, Jack Pendarvis is worth investigating, I think.

And I've just finished sticking a huge mass of stuff, exclusively about Southern literature, on my blog, in which there are several obscure writers covered.

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[lenz]

Hi lionel,
What about Tennessee Williams? Has Blanche Dubois been forgotten along with Belle Rive? Aside from the great plays, there are short stories of a very high quality.

 

[lionel]

Hi lionel,
What about Tennessee Williams? Has Blanche Dubois been forgotten along with Belle Reve? Aside from the great plays, there are short stories of a very high quality.

Hi lenz
Ouch! This is a subconscious omission, related to guilt and regret. Just ten weeks ago, we were in north Mississippi and agonised over going to the Welcome Center in Columbus, which of course is Tennessee Williams's former home, or moving on to the Oxford area with its Fa(u)lkner associations, plus T. S. Stribling's home in Clifton, Tennessee, before moving on to the many other literary places we intended to visit. In the end, we realised that we'd given ourselves a little too much time in Atlanta, Georgia, where we had to take the flight back, but we didn't know at the time that Atlanta is far too overrated.

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[lionel]

Without prior knowledge that these authors are/were not from the South, could one tell that just by reading the novels?

I should have replied to this earlier, but it's only just come to my attention because, I think, I leapfrogged an earlier post and missed it. But this is a brilliant, and very difficult, question, and I think the answer must be that it depends on the reader. As the Vorse is far more interesting than the Berendt, and as it can be compared with other novels concerning the Gastonia strike, I'll just deal with that. Of the six Gastonia novels, I've only read Lumpkin's and Vorse's: one novel written by an 'insider' (in other words one from Appalachia), and one by an 'outsider' respectively. Lumpkin's first novel, To Make My Bread, would probably by considered by many to be inferior on the grounds of the 'literary merit' beast, and indeed Vorse's Strike! is in may ways much more professional, much better conceived. I think this is its central flaw, though: it's clinical and distant, the work of an outsider looking in. It tries too hard, and in so doing betrays its artificiality.

In a word: yes, I think you can see the difference, but then I think you have to be aware that you're looking for it, as realisation won't come passively, and you risk just being swept up by the story. Obviously, though, if you live in the area you'll be far better equipped to spot the joins.

But isn't this very similar to reading a work in translation, where we might ignore the strange, distant voice, the many jarring notes, merely to read on? I'm not sure, but that's a really interesting question you ask.

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[Bubba]

I'm from the South myself, but am not especially well versed in the literature of my native region. I also think lists such as the top ten in the first post are largely unhelpful, and are unlikely to steer readers to books, or even writers, they are likely to enjoy. That particular list smacks of political correctness and received ideas. Absalom, Absalom! is one of Faulkner's most tedious books, for example. Ordinary readers would enjoy many others much more. Nor am I so sure categorizing all these writers as "southern" is in any way useful. And I detest it when my fellow southern readers, as they sometimes do, read and worship "southern" literature to the exclusion of all else.

That said, I think many of the best books from the US are "regional" books, books whose writers are unafraid of being cast as provincials, books that are, in a sense, parochial--and thus, paradoxically, universal--whereas much of the worst recent literature from the US is produced by the many writers along the New Jersey-New York-Connecticut axis who, perhaps starting with Fitzgerald, seem to believe that they and their often frivolous and petty concerns are at the center of the universe. "All those Johns," as Edward Abbey used to say. The funny thing is that much of the rest of the reading world seems to accept this belief: it's astonishing how many books by the latest New York writers get translated into French, German, Spanish. I go into bookstores in France and can't believe what I see on the shelves devoted to recent American literature.

Among the "regional" American writers I enjoy are Willa Cather from the Midwest; Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Richard Bradford from the mountain West. (Bradford, author of only two books, illustrates the futility of these characterizations by region, as he could also be labeled a southern writer; his Red Sky at Morning begins in Mobile, Alabama, but takes place mostly in northern New Mexico. Red Sky is an odd book; you might, as I did, read it five or six times during your adolescence, then forget it as you move on, in your twenties, to heavier, more intellectual fare, only to find yourself, years later, wondering what in the world became of your copy of the book and even thinking of it with a kind of longing.)

Some of the southerners on the lists in the posts above I've also read with delight (though I find the list too heavily skewed toward the novel--many southern writers are, I think, at their best in the short story). Eudora Welty's novels, for example, can be tedious, but I found my heart racing as I read her slightly difficult story "First Love," an astonishing combination of the historical (the trial of the American "traitor" Aaron Burr) and the personal. George Garrett and Peter Taylor, whose novels are on some of the lists above, are also very good, especially, in my view, when they are writing short stories. What little (stories only) of Larry Brown and Wendell Berry I've read has likewise been excellent. I've also read and enjoyed all of Walker Percy, who, I might add, detested being called a "southern" writer.

I won't close without mention of Charles Portis, two of whose novels--True Grit and Masters of Atlantis--are on one of the lists above. Despite its inclusion on a list of southern books, True Grit is a "Western" (those labels again!) and it was made into a movie starring John Wayne (and is being remade by the Coen brothers); we literati, of course, would normally turn up our noses at such fare. But True Grit, like everything Portis has written, is extraordinarily good; even the smallest details, such as the name of the hero's cat, are telling. Masters of Atlantis is good, too, but much harder. I would recommend reading it only after True Grit, The Dog of the South, Norwood, and Gringos, Portis's other novels. In either Gringos or The Dog of the South, both of which take place partly in Mexico and Central America, a Mexican complains to one of Portis's characters, a southerner, of course, about the "Yankees" having stolen half of his country as a result of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Portis's character retorts that in 1865 the Yankees took all of his country.

 

[Bubba]

Another "southern" novelist I forgot, and who is perhaps entirely unknown to Americans, is the Frenchman (of southern US parentage) Julien Green. Green died about ten years ago, and his work seems now to be a little bit neglected, even in France.

I thought his novels Dixie, Les Pays lointains, and Les Etoiles du sud (don't know if they've been translated into English) were very good, very stylish, solidly characterized.

Oddly, Green sympathizes with the planters of the antebellum South. Oddly, because in the US no southern writer of serious literature would dare take a similar stance. Just goes to show that living outside the US can give the US writer more freedom to write about his country. Green sympathizes with the slaves as well--and has memorable slave characters--but, for me, one of the most memorable things about the books may be his horrified repugnance of the lowly lives of those whose name he can barely stand to utter. Who were those unmentionable creatures? The "white trash," of course! Now, I myself am of largely white-trash stock, but far from taking offense at Green's repugnance--Green was a refined Parisian homosexual--I found it amusing. I don't imagine it went over too badly with Green's French readers, either.

 

[accidie]

Wonderful suggestion, Bubba. One doesn't often see mention of Green, at least in the English-speaking world.
I was very surprised to see Stoner on one of the lists. In what way is it Southern? or is it simply that I've forgotten that aspect of the book?
To me there is very much a Southern feel to James Purdy's books. But is he considered southern? He grew up in Ohio. I lived for a short time in central Ohio and not only did the area seem in some way Appalachian, it was the only place I've heard 'she' pronounced with three syllables. Isn't there some vague sensiblity, perhaps of the grotesque, in Southern writing that transcends location?

 

[nnyhav]

sumpinnew
Still
literature of the mountain south
(via wood_s_lot)

 

[lionel]

sumpinnew
Still
literature of the mountain south
(via wood_s_lot)

Wow, thanks for this, nnyhav, there's some very interesting stuff here. It's great to know, too, that there's so much opposition to MTR (Mountain Top Removal). Casually looking at the link, I thought it was exclusively about James Still, who, I can't help thinking, would have been much better known if he'd chosen to make his forename 'Whiskey'!

It's, er, still early days for Still, but I hope they'll soon put in links to Affrilachian literature: this word is now accepted by some dictionaries - and not just online ones - for Black Appalachians, when it was discovered that Webster's Dictionary only included whites in its definition of 'Appalachian':
Affrilachian Poets - History
pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture

And still on the subject of definitions, we mustn't forget that Appalachia by no means includes just the South: even if we include West Virginia as a Southern state because it once belonged to Virginia, there's no way, for instance, that Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the state of New York can ever be described as Southern.

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