BEFORE I LEFT OXFORD, I swung by Square Books one last time to grab a coffee before the long drive home and idly leaf through the riches there. Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Harry Crews, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, John Kennedy Toole, and, of course, William Faulkner: all of the people whose homes I visited were amply represented. It was amazing to see, all these literary treasures from a place once forsaken as a cultural desert. There was a time when being from the South meant that you couldn’t put pen to paper; now it means that you’re imbued with a mysterious writerly spirit. It’s not just Square, either: The South has many of these marvelous places, these little bookstores that serve as hubs for a literary community and champions for writers. In Jackson, I sometimes head to Lemuria Books on my way back from the airport, sometimes taking time to glance in the back where the signed copies of Faulkner and O’Connor are nestled in with first editions of Airships and Larry Brown’s Dirty Work. In New Orleans, there’s Faulkner House Books in the French Quarter and Maple Street Book Store Uptown, just a block away from where John Kennedy Toole and his mother lived; Maple Street’s owner, Rhoda Faust, was one of the people who worked with Thelma Toole and Walker Percy to get Confederacy of Dunces published. In Birmingham, there’s the stately Alabama Booksmith and college student hangout The Little Professor, both places I spent many afternoons in browsing. In Atlanta, there’s the cozy A Capella Books, a gold mine for out-of-print titles; in Nashville, the airy and inviting Parnassus Books; and in Asheville, the nicely curated Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café.
I still don’t entirely know what it is exactly about the South that inspired so many great writers to labor over it. But I think I have a better idea now. I lingered over the shelves full of local and Southern writers. Though the sites I had visited had, with one exception, been tied to writers who had died, the Southern literary tradition is far from dead, as those shelves teeming with new entries, from Ron Rash’s The Cove to Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, proved. New writers have decided to stake out claims on their own tiny patches of earth—authors like Jesmyn Ward, whose aching novel Salvage the Bones focused on a family in rural Mississippi in the days before Katrina, Thomas Pierce, a Charlottesville-based writer of nimble, finely wrought stories, and Ann Pancake, a vibrant chronicler of Appalachian America. Each of them, it seemed to me, were talking to one another across time and style and subject matter. It was a vast conversation about the region, the creatures that lived there, the mannerisms and myths that became entwined with the place. The South is not just the setting; it’s the soul of the thing. It comes with a fraught history, with accents and anxieties, with expectations and mythologies to contend with. Southern literature is about preservation, marking out the idiosyncrasies that distinguish the region from others, and it is also about a kind of controlled destruction, constantly replacing the idea of the place with the concrete details of it. It is an ongoing cartographic exercise, to trace and retrace the boundaries of the South, to try to figure out what it contains. It’s about figuring out just where exactly you are. It’s about going home.