Eudora Welty (1909–2001)
The first thing that I read and really loved by Eudora Welty was The Optimist’s Daughter, a tightly packed novel about a woman coping with the death of her father and a house full of memories. For this book, I also had the pleasure of rereading many of Welty’s short stories, such as the ever-hilarious “Why I Live at the P.O.” and the aching “A Worn Path,” which are both available in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. The work of Welty’s biographer, Suzanne Marrs, was immensely helpful, and I particularly delighted in What There Is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, which Marrs edited. Ditto the account of restoring Welty’s garden put together by preservationist and garden designer Susan Haltom and landscape historian Jane Roy Brown, One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place. And for those who tell me that they aren’t entranced by Welty’s fiction, I always point to her brilliant collection The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, assessments and observations as interesting and sharp now as they were when Welty was writing them.
Richard Wright (1908–1960)
Richard Wright’s powerful memoir, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, was the inspiration for one of these chapters, and I highly recommend it. Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children are also natural choices, but Wright’s publishing career went far beyond that. He wrote poetry (Haiku: This Other World) and many volumes of nonfiction and essays (White Man, Listen! and I Choose Exile are both interesting reflections on the oppressions of racism and colonialism). For a biography of Wright, look to Hazel Rowley’s excellent Richard Wright: The Life and Times.
William Faulkner (1897–1962)
The Sound and the Fury remains my favorite William Faulkner book; like most things he’s written, it gets richer each time you read it. Absalom, Absalom! is a close second, and the first book of his I read was The Unvanquished, which is a good entry point if you normally shy away from stream-of-consciousness high modernism. Joseph Blotner’s definitive Faulkner: A Biography was enormously helpful in getting a sense of the man, as was the deeply charming Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi by his niece Dean Faulkner Wells. I would also strongly encourage a read of Faulkner’s interview with The Paris Review, the source of many of his most famous quips, which is available online, bless them.
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
Though I have a soft spot for her novels, especially Wise Blood, the volume that I keep coming back to by Flannery O’Connor is The Complete Stories, which has both her greatest hits (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People”) and lesser-known gems (“Judgment Day” and “Greenleaf”). O’Connor’s letters, collected and edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, are an absolute joy to read, and make me personally regret the invention of e-mail. Her wit and analysis are on full display in the essay and speeches collection Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, which captured her famous dictum about large and startling figures. Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor was not only incredibly valuable to my research, it is also an absorbing read in itself, and I recommend it.
Harry Crews (1935–2012)
Many of Harry Crews’s books are currently out of print, which is a damn shame, but the ones that you can get your hands on, you’d be well advised to read. My favorite, no secret, is his brutal memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, which is packed neatly among the deeply weird novels Car and The Gypsy’s Curse and three of Crews’s essays in the edition Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader. Crews’s harsh and haunting A Feast of Snakes will blow your lid off, as will his first novel, The Gospel Singer. And to get a taste of what Crews was like to interact with, look to the interview collection Getting Naked with Harry Crews, edited by Erik Bledsoe.
Harper Lee (b. 1926) and Truman Capote (1924–1984)
Harper Lee’s most enduring work is her first one, To Kill a Mockingbird, though there aren’t many to choose from. Luckily, there is no such lack of publication by Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote. In Cold Blood is the true crime novel that the two collaborated on, and well worth your time to peruse. My favorite essay of his is “A Christmas Memory,” though his account of a little boy stuck in a decaying antebellum mansion in the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms is equally great. Capote’s biographer, Gerald Clarke, published two go-to texts for my understanding of Capote’s life, Capote: A Biography and the deliciously catty Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote.
John Kennedy Toole (1937–1969)
The posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces is most of what we have from John Kennedy Toole, as well as The Neon Bible, the manuscript Toole wrote for a literary contest when he was sixteen. Cory MacLauchlin’s biography Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces, is a well-researched and thoughtful account of Toole, and was instrumental to my research. Toole’s friend Joel Fletcher also has a good account of the interaction between Toole and his mother in Ken & Thelma: The Story of A Confederacy of Dunces.
Barry Hannah (1942–2010) and
Larry Brown (1951–2004)
Where to start with Barry Hannah? Airships, most likely, but his short stories in Captain Maximus are equally excellent. If you haven’t read any Hannah, the collection Long, Last Happy, which samples stories from throughout his publishing career, is worth picking up. His novella Ray is also worth your time, as is his first book Geronimo Rex. For this book, I also read and enjoyed A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah, a collection of memories about Hannah from former students, friends, and colleagues. Larry Brown’s short-story collection Facing the Music got me hooked, and Big Bad Love kept me on the line. Brown’s essays in Billy Ray’s Farm and his memoir On Fire give a good idea of the obstacles Brown overcame in his writing career, and his love of his pocket of North Mississippi. Jean W. Cash’s Larry Brown: A Writer’s Life was also a very instructive and interesting biography, and filled in some of the gaps left from Brown’s memoirs.