John Wharton Lowe
The US South, through the combination of its history, culture, and topography, has long been felt to be the nation’s most distinctive region. This was not always the case; the colonial South was part of a loose confederation of states, and its leaders went on to become dominant forces in the shaping of a new nation. The world’s hunger, however, for the South’s cotton (and also its tobacco, rice, and sugar) drastically increased the region’s wealth and power during the early nineteenth century, as it relied more and more heavily on slave labor to produce its commodities. The debate over slavery sharpened perceptions of regional and cultural differences, and this began to be a dominant motif in both regional and national literatures. The literary South became fixated on inventing a distinct image of the homeland, and in defending it from a North that was more and more seen as a cold, money‐fixated culture intent on destroying southern prosperity, but also, it was felt, their “traditions.” Concurrently the industrial North began constructing the South as a defining “other”; its deficiencies underlined the North’s supposed virtues.
The crushing defeat the South suffered in the Civil War meant burned homes and crops, the end of lucrative international trade, the destruction of factories and railroads, and more, but the most devastating blow was the loss of the capital involved in human bodies. Attempting to snatch victory from defeat, writers of the “plantation school,” the popularity of local color writing, and white appropriation and twisting of black narratives combined to attempt what Nina Silber has called “the romance of reunion.” Much of this literature has faded from view, and has rightly been eclipsed by the emergence of long‐forgotten works by African Americans, women, and ethnic southerners. That would only occur, however, in the latter half of the twentieth century; critics in the dominant literary circles of the North, who controlled literary production, regularly derided southern writing as sentimental, reactionary, and often, racist. This came to a head in 1925 with the critic H.L. Mencken’s famous diatribe, “The Sahara of the Bozart” (1977), which claimed that the South had never produced much literature of merit.
Mencken was both right and wrong. There had certainly been notable southern writers in the preceding centuries, such as Captain John Smith, William Byrd, Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe (who was acknowledged by the Sage of Baltimore), William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and the many authors of slave narratives. Then too, there were writers coming to our attention today who wrote in French, Spanish, Creole, and German, who were not translated in their day into English. The many black writers of the nineteenth century I just mentioned, however – especially the authors of the slave narratives – were out of print when Mencken wrote, and very few people knew about the notable oral narratives of the South’s Native Americans. His essay stung because many of the writers he did identify – most unknown today – were indeed forgettable, as a perusal of the 17‐volume History of Southern Literature (1917) attests.
Ironically, just as Mencken was penning his attack, there were groups of writers forming in southern cities who were excited by the prospect of applying techniques of the new modernist literature of Europe and the Northeast to their region. Sherwood Anderson became the center of a group of Dixie Bohemians in New Orleans, a circle that included the young William Faulkner, Lyle Saxon, Oliver LaFarge, Roark Bradford, and Hamilton Basso. Dubose Heyward spearheaded a literary revival in Charleston, joined by figures such as Beatrice Ravenel, Julia Peterkin, Josephine Pinckney, and Hervey Allen. Many of these writers wrote about African American culture (if often stereotypically), recognizing the centrality of this strand of southern identity.
As emerging writers of the post‐World War I South knew, there had been a sizeable audience in the North for southern writing, both before and after the Civil War; “old Southwest humor” of the nineteenth century found an appreciative outlet in New York magazines for dialect tales – usually told in elevated English by aristocratic narrators – about backwoods tricksters, horse traders, and ne’er‐do‐wells, against the backdrop of quiltings, barn‐raisings, and church camp meetings. The narrators and their characters thereby represented the refined aristocrats and the earthy “peasants” of the feudal – and thus European – South. Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, George Washington Harris, and Johnson Jones Hooper created unforgettable rascals like Simon Suggs and Sut Lovingood; such trickster antics would later inspire many of William Faulkner’s comic creations, including the Snopes family and the local yokels of The Hamlet (1948), and the poor whites of Erskine Caldwell’s rural comedies, whose raucous sexuality was part of modernism’s breaking of social taboos. The stage version of Tobacco Road (premiere 1933) was for many years the longest running play in Broadway’s history, proving both the resilience of stereotypes about the South and the ways such images could morph over time, through events like the Great Depression, industrialization, and the lure of new southern cities and factories.
In a different, more aristocratic vein, the postbellum “romance of reunion” shaped the “plantation school” writing of Thomas Nelson Page, Harry Stillwell Edwards, Thomas Dixon, and Joel Chandler Harris; northern readers eagerly embraced romantic tales of the “days befoh’ de wah” when “darkies” were happy; readers also found appeal in Reconstruction stories of marriages between southern belles and Union soldiers, who soon found that their ideas about race relations were mistaken. The plantation novel continued in the modernist era in the diverse works of black and white writers such as Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Stark Young, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Walker, and in popular romances by figures such as Frank Yerby, Kyle Onstott, and John Jakes. The tradition has led to important works of our own time by African American writers such as Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Edward P. Jones.
There was, however, undoubtedly a rupture between literary eras; we usually demark this with World War I, but it more properly begins with the advent of automobiles, electricity, airplanes, the telephone – in short, modern industrial life – and the flip side of industrialization, environmentally damaging sawmills and factories, soil erosion, chaotic new urban centers, pollution, and, most ominously, horrendously worse forms of warfare, as reflected in the great European conflict which drew in thousands of young black and white southern men. Like other US intellectuals, southern artists of all types were swept up in the chaotic changes caused by these events and factors, particularly those related to new perceptions of European social transformations, especially in regard to gender and race: aesthetic innovation, Freudianism and sexual experimentalism, and the rise of high modernism, first in European capitals (especially Paris and Berlin), then in northern US cities such as Washington, DC and New York. Southern writers such as Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Katherine Anne Porter saw these changes in Europe first hand, but others were profoundly influenced back home.
In a sense, southerners were prepared for this onslaught, for they had suffered invasion and defeat only a few decades earlier, and had seen families, farms, towns, and cities devastated or even destroyed. The loss of the capital of slaves and the breakup of plantations, coupled with lost markets in commodities and new forms of blight like the boll weevil, made a “wasteland” long before industry added its plagues. Ironically, some of their own had championed the industrialization of the South early on: Atlanta’s Henry Grady used his position as editor of the Atlanta Constitution to push the case for the “New South,” a cause also championed by Tuskegee’s Booker T. Washington and North Carolina’s progressive Walter Hines Page. Soon, however, writers working between the turn of the century and World War I began to see the problems of this stance; the dismay of Ellen Glasgow, Sidney Lanier, and Charles Chesnutt foretold the attitude of the 12 Vanderbilt Agrarians, whose Depression‐era manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand (1930), argued forcefully for a return to agricultural culture. The principal figures – Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom – would go on to become early and skillful devotees of literary modernism, southern style, particularly in poetry. Ransom set a strong example in his belief that truth could only come through the local and the particular. The Depression deepened the pessimistic mood of the South, which had suffered one of the greatest floods in the nation’s history in 1927 and a devastating three‐year drought soon after, so the region’s continuing and worsening poverty became in a way a metaphor for the state of the entire nation. Eventually, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s programs, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Program, and the Federal Writer’s Project began to inject hope, but new energies began to circulate from the region’s writers as well, especially in the work of Faulkner, writers associated with Vanderbilt (the Fugitives/Agrarians) and the University of North Carolina (Paul Green, Thomas Wolfe, Howard Odum), and the black southerners who were part of the New Negro Renaissance in Chicago, Washington, and, especially, Harlem. The aims of these writers often conflicted; the contributors to I’ll Take My Stand were all white men, most of whom at the time saw no place for black or female southerners in the lofty halls of regional art. Some of them, however, later regretted their pronouncements in the collection; indeed, Robert Penn Warren, who had defended segregation there, later became a champion of civil rights for African Americans.
During the 1930s, Faulkner and the Harlem writers, by contrast, strove to give voice to the downtrodden, the South and the nation’s “throwaway” people, but also to give play to folk wisdom, cultural rituals, new artistic developments and colonies, and changes in communal structures. Many of the similarly minded rising new writers (albeit white ones) were published alongside non‐southern high modernists such as Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, and Ford Maddox Ford in the pages of The Southern Review, which Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren revived from 1935 to 1942 in Baton Rouge.
One can also argue that the modernist age of southern writing began in earnest some years earlier, with the writer Jean Toomer’s radically experimental short novel, Cane (1923), which built on the Louisiana born but Washington bred author’s mixed‐race background and interest in mixing genres. The work employed poetry, prose, drama, even geometrical patterns to meditate on what Toomer saw as the “swan song” of black folk culture in the South, as he witnessed it during a teaching stint in Sparta, Georgia. Equally attuned to surviving forms of mysticism, lyrical conceptions of the brooding landscape, and especially, the forms of southern sexualities (including dangerous cross‐racial pairings), Toomer alternated his stories of alienated, often doomed southern lovers and eccentrics with stories set in Chicago and Washington, where recent immigrants from the South mingled with sophisticated black northerners against a backdrop of stylish new forms of entertainment, fashion, and club life. Cane drew a positive reaction from the poet Allen Tate, who saw the novel’s rejection of formulaic patterns of southern fiction refreshing and original. He would take this path himself in his great poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1928) and in his Civil War novel, The Fathers (1938).
Although it is unlikely that William Faulkner read Toomer, his early fiction displays a similar postwar daring in its bitter veterans, jaded flappers, and increasingly disruptive modernization and mechanization. Soldier’s Pay (1926), the first of his many novels, offers an epitome of these issues, and begins on a train bearing a severely wounded southern veteran back to his Georgia home. Saturated with the influence of Swinburne, Beardsley, Wilde, and Freud, the novel is more effective at painting a changed South than in telling a coherent and compelling story, but it set the stage for Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels, all of them reflecting his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, a series started with Flags in the Dust, originally titled Sartoris (1929), the first of several family chronicles. Bayard Sartoris returns to Mississippi after witnessing the aerial death of his twin brother John; living with his elderly grandfather Bayard and great‐aunt Jenny, his reckless (and finally, tragic) exploits mirror his ancestors’ during the Civil War, but minus the strict code of honor that old Bayard still embodies. Other elements of the plot demonstrate Faulkner’s increasing arsenal of Freudian motifs, which he would exploit powerfully in a succeeding novel, Sanctuary (1931), which begins with an impotent gangster raping a reckless Ole Miss coed with a corncob. Her kidnaping takes readers into the modern hell of a Memphis whorehouse, where Popeye eagerly watches Temple have sex with a potent thug. Sensational? Yes – but the novel’s profound and unflinching dissection of evil in a seemingly “progressing” world is accomplished via magnificently conceived, if often chilling, narrative technique. While ostensibly drawing on the resources of the detective novel and film noir, Faulkner was likely also thinking of new images of the modern southern woman, which had been powerfully evoked in books like Frances Newman’s satiric farewell to the southern belle, The Hard Boiled Virgin (1926).
The most radical experiment of this period, however, came in Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929), which tells the same story told four times. The first rendition comes from an idiot, Benjy, whose strange syntax and scrambled sense of time create havoc for the reader, thereby making her feel Benjy’s inner confusion. The following section is by his emotionally distraught older brother Quentin, who is sent to Harvard on the proceeds from selling Benjy’s pasture, a sale that also finances the society wedding of their beloved sister Caddie, whose lost honor – and resultant pregnancy – leads to her union with a man who doesn’t know the child isn’t his. In the third section, Jason, a third brother, repels the reader with his brutal treatment of the other characters and his thoroughly capitalist values, but his salty, self‐mocking, and often comic pronouncements provide both clarity of a sort and entertainment after Benjy and Quentin’s often mystifying ruminations. The final section, an omniscient narrator’s exploration of the consciousness of the Compsons’ black servant Dilsey, brings the other sections into configuration, forming a tragic coda to a lost family.
Faulkner created a variant on family sexual secrets in As I Lay Dying (1930), a back‐country pendant to The Sound and the Fury. The poor‐white Bundrens struggle across the torrid landscape with their mother’s putrefying body, honoring her wish to be buried in Jefferson, 40 miles away. Fifty‐nine interior monologues relentlessly fragment the reader’s perspective and force an extraordinary involvement in a story that is both richly comic and deeply tragic. Faulkner’s willingness to expose the South’s racial conundrums cost him dearly in southern circles, but led to some of the most searing and searching narratives in the nation’s history. Light in August (1932) forms a triptych with Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942), providing an electrifying and shocking portrayal of the costs of racial oppression for the people of the state, region, and nation. The first‐cited novel documents the tortured life of the orphan Joe Christmas, who is never sure whether he is black or white. His liaisons with a prostitute, black women, and finally, the spinster daughter of white abolitionists lead to him killing the latter, and his castration and death at the hands of a racial mob. His story is framed and interbraided with that of the gentle Lena Grove, an unwed mother looking for her child’s father, assisted by the love‐struck bachelor Byron Bunch, and ultimately, Byron’s strange friend, the defrocked pastor Gail Hightower, whose feverish recreations of his dead grandfather’s Confederate raid has cost him both his congregation and his wife. The novel also meditates on rapacious new industries of the South, which have led to erosion of the land, migrant workers, and predatory sawmills. The modernist thematic of alienation goes beyond Christmas to encompass many of the other characters, echoing the isolation and despair of Faulkner’s earlier protagonists such as Bayard Sartoris, Horace Benbow, Quentin Compson, and Darl Bundren.
Absalom returns to the methods of The Sound and the Fury, scrambling chronology, as the tale of the rise, decline, and fall of the Sutpen family is rehearsed by Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon in a frigid college dormitory. Readers know from the outset, as in Light in August, what is most significant about the earlier story: Thomas Sutpen’s son Henry shot his best friend, the elegant and refined Charles Bon, originally from Haiti, and Henry’s roommate at Ole Miss and then combat companion during the war, in order to prevent him from marrying Henry’s sister Judith. Set up in the mode of a detective novel, the narrative keeps expanding in meaning as new and startling facts about the murder arise, culminating first in the revelation that Bon already had a black mistress and child, then that he is Henry’s half‐brother by Sutpen’s Haitian first wife; and finally, that that first wife had black blood. Thus, the hidden motif of the novel is that old racist refrain, “But would you want your sister to marry one?”
Go Down, Moses began, as Faulkner’s earlier Civil War novel The Unvanquished (1938) did, as a set of related short stories; in both cases Faulkner rewrote them to make them work together as a novel; he would repeat this method later in his pastoral novel The Hamlet (1940). Again centering on a generational novel, Moses begins in antebellum times and comically, as the twin bachelor McCaslin brothers attempt to evade the marrying schemes of the spinster Sophonsiba, while also trying to practice an enlightened form of slavery, which includes chasing their near‐white enslaved brother, Tomey’s Turl, when he repeatedly runs to Miss Sophonsiba’s plantation to visit his beloved Tennie. Like The Unvanquished, however, the stories become increasingly tragic, as the son of one of the twins and Sophonsiba comes to maturity under the guidance of an old Indian/Negro hunter Sam Fathers, and his cousin McCaslin Edmonds. As in Absalom, a tragic racial secret underlies the family: the patriarch Carothers McCaslin raped a slave woman, and then, years later, his daughter with that woman, producing Tomey.
In strong counterpoint to the racial and familial saga is the story of the diminishing wilderness where most of the male characters hunt. Old Ben, pursued for generations, is a fabled bear whose death requires the raising of a heroic dog, Lion, the reckless but ignorant courage of a young backwoods giant, Boon, and the cunning and wisdom of the old hunter Sam Fathers. The logging of the delta forests, the penetration of the railroads, and the rapaciousness of modern society stain the final chapters and lead to a magnificent tribute to the fading wilderness, limned in some of Faulkner’s greatest prose.
Faulkner’s influence grew over the years; his contemporary, Thomas Wolfe, of Asheville, North Carolina, employed a more conventional style but one equally and sometimes excessively verbose and ornamented. Like Faulkner, memory, sexuality, and family conflicts lie at the heart of his very long novels, which Faulkner professed to admire. The first, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), concentrated on the troubled marriage of Eliza and William Oliver Gant (a stonecutter) and on their traumatized children, particularly Eugene, obviously a stand‐in for the author. Eliza’s home, like the Wolfes’, is also a boarding house, thereby bringing forward a parade of eccentric lodgers who pass in and out of the family’s lives, including Laura James, a boarder with whom Eugene is smitten, only to have her jilt him. Other boarders are invalids, and the thematic of illness and death is advanced through them and the tragic story of Eugene’s sardonic tubercular brother Ben. Of Time and the River (1935) continued the Gant saga, as the family ages and diverges into new families, while Eugene completes his education, largely through travel. Really writing one great story – a fictionalized form of his biography – Wolfe tried to start anew in his other two novels, published posthumously as The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), by renaming his central character George “Monk” Webber, concentrating on his education and travels through the North and Europe, and on his love affair with a Jewish New York stage designer, Esther Jack (a fictional avatar of Wolfe’s own lover, Aline Bernstein).
Faulkner and Wolfe built many of their fictions on family sagas, a method also employed by the Texas‐born Katherine Anne Porter. Her itinerant youth, which involved a bout of tuberculosis, led to her marvelous “Miranda” stories, which centered on the often embittered but gloriously intense Rhea family, with its passion for horses, causes, and mistaken loves, and its litany of wasted lives and early deaths. By contrast, Porter’s extended residences in Mexico led to the exotic and powerful stories in her second collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930). The title tale, centered on a repressed young woman who has devoted herself to the Mexican revolutionary cause, creates dramatic tension through her encounters with a fat, indulgent, and married military leader, who wishes to add her to his long list of conquests. Both are contrasted to a heroic young man who kills himself in prison using drugs the heroine has brought him. Another powerful tale, “María Conceptión,” concerns the primitive title character’s murder of her worthless husband’s mistress, a triangle set against archaeological digs in the village and the ongoing Mexican revolution. Many of Porter’s Mexican tales evince a kind of literary primitivism, but also carry a strong critique of the Catholic church and modes of colonialism. They must now be reconsidered as an opening gambit of southern transnationalism and hemispheric consciousness. While many of Porter’s fictions concern individuals struggling with isolation, her masterful short novel Noon Wine (1937) studies the reactions of a community to a murder, which undo the perpetrator, even though he has been acquitted of the crime.
An often‐ignored element in southern literary history is the role black southerners played in the fabled Harlem Renaissance. Black southern modernists such as Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois made memorable use of the southern “homeland.” Like Faulkner and Wolfe, Florida’s Zora Neale Hurston was fascinated by questing figures, but most of hers were black females. Perhaps no other writer in American literary history save Melville or Emily Dickinson has had such a spectacular return to prominence after decades of neglect than Hurston. She is claimed by feminists, womanists, folklorists, anthropologists, journalists, dramatists, and humorists as a founding member of their “clubs.” Hurston, born in 1891, grew up learning all the biblical stories from her preacher father, but also the wonderful tales she heard listening in on the “lyin’ sessions” townsmen had on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store. She soon learned to invent tales herself. Her family’s domestic security was shattered, however, by her mother’s death in 1904. Zora was farmed out, first to boarding school in Jacksonville, where she learned what it meant to be “colored,” and later to other family members. Eventually, she became the first black student at Barnard, and then worked on a doctorate with anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia. Hurston’s advent into New York coincided with the eruption of the fabled Harlem Renaissance. Her student magazine writing in Washington prepared her for literary competitions in New York, and years later, to the tale of her parents’ fated marriage in the novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), a lyrical but troubling saga that ends tragically with John’s collision with a train. She larded the tale with rich folklore, poetic dialogue, and a provocative central paradox; John’s undeniable talent in the pulpit derives from the same thing that undoes him, his powerful physical presence and appetite for life.
Getting the novel accepted meant that she could finally publish her folklore material in a new form. Reshaping the material by inserting herself as a “character” who links the tales together as we watch her gather them, she came up with Mules and Men (1935), still a classic of American folklore, which also reads like a novel, especially the scenes dealing with her initiation as a hoodoo priestess in New Orleans.
Hurston got some more grants to extend her research and was soon off to Jamaica and Haiti. These trips eventually led to a second anthropological work, Tell My Horse (1938). She wrote another novel, her magnificent Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), during this period, in order, she said, to embalm the love she had for a man, whose demand that she end her career for him led her to instead drop him. The narrative, also set in Eatonville, but also in the Everglades, details the three marriages of Janie Mae Crawford Killens Stark Woods, and how each factors in her inner growth and eventually, her solitary but transcendent personhood, even though she has had to kill and then bury her third husband Teacake, the great love of her life. The novel’s amazing poetic voice comes right out of African American folk culture, but is shaped by Hurston’s now fully developed and very personal aesthetic. It has often been taught as a book about women’s liberation, but it speaks at many registers for all readers everywhere.
During the 1930s, Hurston spent 18 months working for the Federal Writers Project in Florida. She collected some amazing material, learned about other groups in her native state, but also used some of her time to write her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), a superb retelling of the events of Exodus, but from a black perspective and in dialect. Although the book often verges on parody of the sacred text, it also transforms Moses into an African hoodoo man, and comments cogently and powerfully on the problems and opportunities of racial leadership, religion, and the conundrums of exceptionalist definitions of group identity.
Hurston’s final published work was in some ways her most ambitious. Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) focuses on white figures and “Cracker” (poor southern whites) culture, drawing on Hurston’s Federal Writer’s Project work and her absorbed reading of her white friend Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Florida frontier narratives. Jim and Arvay Meserve’s troubled marriage receives a Freudian presentation, but against the backdrop of an accurately observed cultural milieu. The novel also shows Hurston’s beloved Florida undergoing tremendous changes, as industrialization, tourism, and real estate developments pick up steam.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings also wrote powerfully about Florida, concentrating on “Crackers.” Standouts among her many works are South Moon Under (1933), a multigenerational tale of survival in the Florida scrub, and The Yearling (1938), which details the coming of age of a backwoods boy and his pet deer; however, it is really about the struggles of poor whites who try to be self‐sufficient. Her memoir, Cross Creek (1942), tells of her own struggles as a planter, and her sometimes vexed relations with her black servants and neighbors, and Crackers.
Unlike Rawlings, a black southerner writing during this period had no use for Hurston. Richard Wright, who suffered many brutal indignities during his poverty‐stricken early years in Mississippi (detailed in his biography, Black Boy [1945]), never had the secure racial identity Hurston acquired in her all‐black town. His raging fictions, beginning with the searing stories in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), force the reader to stare directly into the South’s horrifying racial practices. He would then turn his attention to the diaspora blacks in Chicago, where he had immigrated as a young man. Native Son (1940) concerns a young Bigger Thomas, whose role as chauffeur to a white family leads to his accidental killing of a young heiress. Panicked, he mutilates and burns her body, but then tries to draw a ransom. Ultimately, he brutally kills his black girlfriend and, after a hectic chase, is imprisoned and then tried. His white attorney recasts his story as a representative and tragic one, but a seemingly unrepentant and indeed defiant Bigger is sentenced to death.
Several tales also set in the North followed, but he returned to his southern roots in short stories and a powerful final novel, The Long Dream (1958), which details the dangerous double life of a black undertaker, Tyree, and his reckless son, Fishbelly; the story culminates in a fictional recreation of a huge dance hall fire that actually transpired in Natchez during Wright’s youth. The novel concludes with Fishbelly’s exile to France, after the murder of his father by his former partner in criminal activities, the white police chief, and Fishbelly’s near death at the hands of the same figure. The novel importantly focuses on black sexuality, as both central figures use and abuse black women, who sometimes mount powerful arguments against their oppression. Wright reigned as chief black literary master for a diaspora group of writers and intellectuals; he also served as a major influence in his last decades on the young writers Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Black Power (1954), White Man, Listen! (1957), The Color Curtain (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957) were written out of his increasing involvement with communities of color in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, situating him as one of the most transnational of southern writers.
Mississippi produced two other key figures of literary modernism, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams. Welty’s public persona as a genteel maiden lady belied her steely intelligence, her sense of artistic and aesthetic daring, and her wicked sense of humor. Her folk protagonists possess an earthy wisdom that elevates them above primitivism, even when they blindly oppose isolated intellectuals and artists trying to elevate the culture.
Welty herself grew up in a comfortable family in Jackson, but received her education in Wisconsin, New York, and Iowa. Like Hurston, leaving the South for a time gave her valuable perspective, particularly on the rural Mississippians she documented in writing and in photographs for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Depression. Welty’s many historical tales – “A Still Place,” for instance, involves Audubon – magically recreate the fabled age of the wilderness South, replete with pirates, Indians, and damsels in distress (her 1942 novel, The Robber Bridegroom, a small gem in this tradition, became a Broadway musical). Welty, an expert gardener, excels (as Faulkner did) in painting the haunting beauty of the southern landscape, identifying trees and flowers, summoning up scents, conjuring the varieties of the often violent climate as it interacts with her characters’ lives. She created superlative dialogue, especially in the hilarious repartee of her comic stories such as “Petrified Man” or “Why I Live at the P.O.” Like Faulkner, Wright, and Hurston, she knew exactly when and how to use dialect, and when to wax lyrical. Her first two short story collections, A Curtain of Green (1941) and The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), signaled the advent of a major, multidimensional voice in southern fiction.
Her other novels, Delta Wedding (1946), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimist’s Daughter (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972), are detailed, sometimes rambling, but eloquent evocations of differing kinds of Mississippi families and communities as they face moments of change and challenge. Both southern tradition and anti‐intellectualism get their due, alongside profound meditations on southern modes of sexual identity and racial constructs. Many critics, however, regard her short stories as her greatest achievement, especially the connected cycle of tales, Golden Apples (1949), which skillfully and lyrically interweaves village tales and folk practices with classical mythology. Welty often focuses on difference, be it deaf mutes, carnival freaks, a grief‐stricken black musician, a retarded girl, or a lonely traveling salesman.
Williams, arguably the second greatest US dramatist (after O’Neill), made the South his central focus, and usually placed a white woman at the center of his conflicts. His greatest plays – The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) – present contemporary characters dealing with both the burdens of the southern past and the contradictory and confusing demands of contemporary life. Williams, born in Mississippi, was raised in St. Louis, the setting of Menagerie, but he quickly gravitated to the Big Easy as a young adult, and many of his best works are set there or on the Gulf coast. He also, however, set many of his works outside the South, in places like Rome, the Pacific coast of Mexico, and the Galapagos islands, where regional thematics found a new register. Only Lillian Hellman came close to Williams in output and reputation in southern drama of this period.
Flannery O’Connor’s short stories are full of rage and redemption, perhaps because of her resentment of her long affliction (lupus) and her fiery, deeply Catholic judgment of her fundamentalist neighbors in middle Georgia. Masterpieces include the tragicomedy “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953), wherein a vacationing family, led astray by their domineering grandmother, is assassinated by the “Misfit,” a sullen criminal and his gang; “Good Country People” (1955), about the theft of a bitter young woman’s artificial leg by a traveling salesman; “The Displaced Person” (1955), wherein a European immigrant is killed with the consent of blacks and whites alike after he sends to Poland for a relative he plans to marry to a black; “The Artificial Nigger” (1955), a classic mockery of racial bias. Her strange novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), both involve religious fanaticism and tragically misplaced callings to prophecy. Her work has been deeply influential, especially on other Catholic writers, particularly Walker Percy and Cormac McCarthy, but also on her black fellow Georgians, Alice Walker, John O. Killens, and Raymond Andrews. During graduate school in Iowa she read deeply in modernist masters such as Eliot, Joyce, and Faulkner, whose style and linguistic experimentations, rather than attitude, ultimately shaped her work. Her isolated life as an invalid in the country under her mother’s care led to an extensive epistolary outreach; her letters, models of pithy, concise, provocative expression, are another precious legacy. Questioned about the extremities in which she placed her characters (who are often seen as “grotesques”) and the seemingly over‐the‐top intensity of her narratives, she famously stated that with deaf people you have to shout, a sentiment perhaps shared by many of her predecessors, peers, and successors in the southern literary canon.
One of the avenues southern writers found to national audiences was embracing the modernist cult of the “primitive.” Since Reconstruction (and even earlier), northern and urban Americans had looked to the South for “backwoods” characters, tall tales, and folk humor, idiom, and dialect. It was only a step further to the modern grotesques and/or primitives of Erskine Caldwell, Julia Peterkin, Roark Bradford, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Vereen Bell, and DuBose Heyward. These writers variously produce tragic, comic, and even saintly figures from this milieu – one thinks, in the latter sense, of the haunting (if strictly posed) faces in Walter Evans and James Agee’s pictural narrative, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The most obvious examples, however, of the eccentric, “grotesque” characters may be found in the major writers William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, and especially, Flannery O’Connor, whose back‐country fundamentalists are often thrown unexpectedly and violently into illuminating, if sometimes fatal, scenes of revelation. The fact that Wright, Hurston, and Welty all worked for the Federal Writers Project/WPA gathering folk materials during the 1930s surely accounts for the accuracy of their portrayals of southern citizens of all types.
Curiously, most of the great writers of this period rather ignore southern cities, although DuBose Heyward set Porgy (1925) in Charleston’s black slums, and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) made literary capital out of the swagger of a rebuilt, postbellum Atlanta. It is likely this pattern resulted from an almost obsessive interest in the conflict of the agrarian past and the industrial present and future, which seemingly was best dramatized in the countryside and in small towns like Faulkner’s Jefferson. The one great city that finds constant usage in early modern southern writing is New Orleans, the setting for all or parts of Faulkner’s novels, several of Williams’s and Hellman’s plays, and stories and non‐fiction by Porter, Hurston, and Warren.
Perhaps the last great early modernist, author of one of the most celebrated southern novels, and, after Poe, perhaps the most distinguished southern poet, Robert Penn Warren was an early champion of Faulkner. Educated at Vanderbilt, he was the youngest contributor to I’ll Take My Stand (1930), and before he became famous, an earnest professor at Louisiana State University, where he and his colleague Cleanth Brooks resurrected the celebrated journal The Southern Review. He researched his greatest novel while in Baton Rouge; All the King’s Men (1946) tells a fictionalized version of the short but electrifying career of Louisiana’s home‐grown, baby‐faced governor – and then senator – Huey Long, whose demagogic populism made him a threat to Roosevelt’s presidency. The novel interweaves a complicated version of Long’s life with a tangled chronology full of modern and antebellum flashbacks, replete with brilliant symbolism, often nihilist philosophy on the part of its jaded narrator, Jack Burden, and a shrewd sense of Machiavellian echoes in southern culture. Like Faulkner, Warren was fixated by the presence of the past in the present, man’s struggle against his baser instincts, and the compromises that prove necessary for the workings of society. He employed the sinister metaphor of a malignant spider in its web to stand for the menaces modern life had for hapless individuals. An equally fine poet, Warren would go on to write such acclaimed lyrics as Audubon: A Vision (1969).
The writers considered here had many apprentices, heirs, and disciples in the later modern/postmodern period, including Carson McCullers, William Styron, Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Walker Percy, Lillian Smith, Albert Murray, Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, Frank Yerby, Jill McCorkle, Barry Hannah, Reynolds Price, Dave Smith, Ishmael Reed, John Kennedy Toole, Elizabeth Spencer, Raymond Andrews, John O. Killens, Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, and Cormac McCarthy.
Georgia’s McCullers’s sensitive portrayals of the agonies of young adulthood stand out in her two masterworks, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and The Member of the Wedding (1946). She was also a pioneer in the portrayal of sexuality and gender, and in pointing to the multiethnic mixing in the region. Harper Lee’s beloved To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) continued this portrait of southern childhood, as young Scout experiences the trial of an unjustly accused black man, who is defended by her lawyer father Atticus. John Kennedy Toole’s raucous and hilarious A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) limned an astonishing portrait of New Orleans through the eyes of its boisterous hero, Ignatius Riley. Toole’s novel was initially championed by Walker Percy, whose sequence of luminous novels began with another New Orleans tale, The Moviegoer (1961), whose Binx Bolling follows a Kierkegaardean path to enlightenment. Louisiana also produced another comic writer, James Wilcox, whose inhabitants of Tula Springs weave an intricate comedy of redemption. Other outstanding writers from the coastal South in the postmodern period include the poets Brenda Marie Osbey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Natasha Trethewey, and the novelists Edward P. Jones, Madison Smartt Bell, Tina Ansa, Richard Ford, Tom Franklin, Anne Rice, Olympia Vernon, Karen Russell, and Valerie Martin, and the playwright Tony Kushner.
New currents in southern literature began to flow in the 1960s with the advent of Cormac McCarthy’s gothic Appalachian novels. This period produced three very popular novelists: the crime writer James Lee Burke, the feminist Fannie Flagg, and the vampire maven Anne Rice. Following this period, southerners continued to intersect with major historical events: Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1985) and the poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau (1986) documented the tragedy of the Vietnam War and its effect on the South, while McCarthy’s “border trilogy” shifted his focus to the historical Southwest and Mexico. Key neo‐slave narratives rehearsed an earlier age from a black perspective, especially Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003); that same year, the white writer Valerie Martin’s Property undertook a similar revision. Perhaps the most monumental rehearsal of history came in Madison Smartt Bell’s trilogy – All Souls’ Rising (1994), Master of the Crossroads (2000), and The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004) – which rendered a rich and disturbing portrait of the Haitian Revolution. These tragic visions were complemented by Alice Randall’s satire, The Wind Done Gone (2001), which wickedly signified on Mitchell’s blockbuster. Similarly, Hurricane Katrina, now a part of southern history, generated Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), and she has followed it with her recent acclaimed narrative, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), which details struggles with addiction and incarceration.
Perhaps the greatest living southern writer, Ernest J. Gaines, has set virtually all of his work in and around the fictional hamlet of Bayonne. His excellent first novels, Catherine Carmier (1964) and Of Love and Dust (1967), were followed by a masterwork, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), the story of a black woman who experiences slavery, Reconstruction, the Depression, and the Civil Rights movement. His subsequent novel, In My Father’s House (1978), examined black militancy and the conflict between a minister and his rebellious son. Gaines used multiple narrators in A Gathering of Old Men (1983) to tell a dramatic tale of racial confrontation, one centered on the meaning of black masculinity. His second masterwork, A Lesson Before Dying (1993), portrays the struggle of a black schoolteacher to prepare an unjustly condemned young prisoner to face his death with dignity. The rural community that produced and supports them both plays a key role. Four of Gaines’s works have been made into memorable films, and at the age of 84, he recently produced a novella, The Tragedy of Brady Sims (2017).
Gaines’s friend from his years in California, Georgia’s Alice Walker, has also contributed powerful portraits of the African American South. Justly famous for her pathbreaking novel about gender relations, The Color Purple (1982), her The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) and Meridian (1976) gave powerful voice to agricultural African American culture and, in the latter work, the Civil Rights movement. These works complemented Anne Moody’s stirring autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), which touched on all these issues.
As the above discussion indicates, the case for southern literature has been immeasurably buttressed in the past few decades by the acceptance among critics of all regions of African American writers of the South into the ever‐dynamic canon of southern writing. This has caused not only a reconsideration of the biracial quality of southern culture, its role in shaping racial perceptions in the nation as a whole, but also a fresh assessment of both black and white writers as they relate to each other across the racial divide, and to the many things they share in southern culture as a whole.
More recently, both writers and critics have exploded that notion of bi‐chromatic perceptions to include Native Americans, Asian Americans, and immigrants to the region during all periods of its history, and the record of incoming cultures that has accelerated significantly in our own new century. The transnational South has brought new writers and cultures into play. Books like James Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992), Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997), and Monica Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth (2010) focus on Vietnamese immigrants to the South; Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox (2004) features the interplay of an assortment of immigrants with natives of the Mississippi delta. LeAnne Howe’s stirring Native American novels Shell Shaker (2001) and The Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), Josephine Humphrey’s Nowhere Else on Earth (2000), and Linda Hogan’s Power (1999) have brought a new consciousness to the rich Native culture of the region.
Southern writers have also given us works featuring “the magically real.” These writers include the aforementioned Tony Kushner, Linda Hogan, and Roberto Fernández, and, especially, Randall Kenan, whose portrait of rural African Americans – some of them gay – draws on this mode, as in A Visitation of Spirits (1989).
Any survey of contemporary southern writing has to include the stunning work of Edwidge Danticat, an immigrant from Haiti currently living and writing in Miami, and the Latino writers of the New New South, who include the late Judith Ortiz Cofer, Cristina García, Virgil Suarez, Ana Menéndez, Roberto Fernández, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat.
A sign of the continuing excellence of southern writers can be seen in the large number who have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. After Faulkner’s posthumous 1963 award for The Reivers, the Prize for fiction went to Katherine Anne Porter, Harper Lee, Eudora Welty, Shirley Anne Grau, William Styron, Michael Shaara, James Alan McPherson, John Kennedy Toole, Alice Walker, Larry McMurtry, Peter Taylor, Robert Olen Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, and Donna Tartt. Pulitzers in poetry since the 1960s have been awarded to Robert Penn Warren, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Wright, and Natasha Trethewey. The Award in Drama has gone to Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Robert Schenkkan, Tony Kushner, Alfred Uhry, Horton Foote, Paula Vogel, Nilo Cruz, and Tracy Letts. More recently, an exciting new group of writers has emerged, including those grouped as the “Dirty South.” Many of them have been paired with earlier writers in a subset called “Grit Lit.” Here we find Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, Rick Bragg, Lewis Nordan, Tim Gautreaux, Tom Ford, Ann Pancake, and Robert Morgan.
All of these artists, and the many others contemporary with them, have been reassessed recently by a new set of critics, who have been unusually interested in race, gender, sexual preference, economics, national identity, and, increasingly, the connections the writers made outside the boundaries of the Old Confederacy, particularly across the Atlantic, the Gulf, and the Caribbean. Hybridity, issues of diaspora (be it Jewish, Italian, Irish, or more usually, African), and perusals of performances of various kinds of identity have predominated. It is a testimony to the power and creativity of these artists that their works continue to provoke and nourish the imagination in fascinating new ways, through new critical readings that complicate, sometimes contradict, but almost always complement the analyses made in past critical eras. As these modernist works are also increasingly compared and contrasted to those that have followed and will be written in the years to come, we are sure to enjoy both a continuum and continuing shift in the study of southern letters, mimicking the “changing same” of the region’s great metaphor, the constantly streaming but always shape‐shifting Ole Man River.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 2 (REGIONAL LITERARY EXPRESSIONS); CHAPTER 7 (MODERNISM AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL).