Southern literature
Encyclopedia
Southern literature is defined as American literature
about the Southern United States
or by writers from this region. Characteristics of Southern literature include a focus on a common Southern history, the significance of family
, a sense of community
and one’s role within it, a sense of justice, the region's dominant religion
(Christianity
— see Protestantism
) and the burdens/rewards religion often brings, issues of racial tension
, land and the promise it brings, a sense of social class
and place, and the use of the Southern dialect
.
, Georgia
, Florida
, Alabama
, North Carolina
, Virginia
, Tennessee
, Mississippi
, Louisiana
, Texas
, Oklahoma
, Kentucky
, West Virginia
and Arkansas
. Pre-Civil War definitions of the South often included Missouri
, Maryland
, and Delaware
as well.
In addition to the geographical component of Southern literature, certain themes have appeared because of the similar histories of the Southern states in regard to slavery, the American Civil War
, and Reconstruction. The conservative culture in the South has also produced a strong focus within Southern literature on the significance of family, religion, community in one's personal and social life, the use of the Southern dialect
, and a strong sense of "place." The South
's troubled history with racial issues also continually appears in its literature.
Despite these common themes, there is debate as to what makes writers and their literature "Southern". For example, Mark Twain
, arguably the father of Southern literature , defined the characteristics that many people associate with Southern writing in his novel
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He even referred to himself as a "Southern writer". In addition, many famous Southern writers headed to the Northern U.S. as soon as they were old enough to make it on their own. So while geography is a factor, the geographical birth of the author is not the defining factor in Southern writing.
: Captain John Smith
's account of the founding of Jamestown in the 1610s and 1620s, and William Byrd II
's secret plantation diary, kept in the early 18th century. Both sets of recollections are critical documents in early Southern history.
After American independence, in the early 19th century, the expansion of cotton planting and slavery began to distinguish Southern society and culture more clearly from the rest of the young republic. During this antebellum period, South Carolina
, and particularly the city of Charleston, rivaled and perhaps surpassed Virginia as a literary community. Writing in Charleston, the lawyer and essayist Hugh Swinton Legare, the poets Paul Hamilton Hayne
and Henry Timrod
, and the novelist William Gilmore Simms
composed some of the most important works in antebellum Southern literature.
Simms was a particularly significant figure, perhaps the most prominent Southern author before the American Civil War
. His novels of frontier life and the American revolution celebrated the history of South Carolina. Like James Fenimore Cooper
, Simms was strongly influenced by Walter Scott
, and his works bore the imprint of Scott's heroic romanticism
. In The Yemassee, The Kinsmen, and the anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin
novel The Sword and the Distaff, Simms presented idealized portraits of slavery and Southern life. While popular and well regarded in South Carolina—and highly praised by such critics as Edgar Allan Poe
-- Simms never gained a large national audience.
Some critics regard Poe himself as a Southern author—he was raised in Richmond, attended the University of Virginia, and edited the Southern Literary Messenger
from 1835 to 1837. Yet in his poetry and fiction Poe rarely took up distinctively Southern themes or subjects; his status as a "Southern" writer remains ambiguous.
In the Chesapeake region, meanwhile, antebellum authors of enduring interest include John Pendleton Kennedy, whose novel Swallow Barn offered a colorful sketch of Virginia plantation life; and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker
, whose 1836 work The Partisan Leader
foretold the secession of the Southern states, and imagined a guerrilla war in Virginia between federal and secessionist armies.
Not all noteworthy Southern authors during this period were white. Frederick Douglass
's Narrative is perhaps the most famous first-person account of black slavery in the antebellum South. Harriet Jacobs, meanwhile, recounted her experiences in bondage in North Carolina in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
. And another Southern-born ex-slave, William Wells Brown
, wrote Clotel; or, The President's Daughter -- widely believed to be the first novel ever published by an African-American. The book depicts the life of its title character, a daughter of Thomas Jefferson
and his black mistress, and her struggles under slavery.
." This nostalgic literature began to appear almost immediately after the war ended; The Conquered Banner
was published on June 24, 1865. These writers idealized the defeated South and its lost culture. Prominent writers with this point of view included poets Henry Timrod
, Daniel B. Lucas
, Abram Joseph Ryan
, and Sidney Lanier
and fiction writer Thomas Nelson Page
. Others, like African American
writer Charles W. Chesnutt
, dismissed this nostalgia
by pointing out the racism
and exploitation of blacks that happened during this time period in the South.
In 1884, Mark Twain
published what is arguably the most influential southern novel of the 19th century, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway
said of the novel, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." This statement applies even more to southern literature because of the novel's frank dealings with issues such as race and violence.
Kate Chopin
was another central figure in post-Civil War Southern literature. Focusing her writing largely on the Acadian/Cajun communities of Louisiana, Chopin established her literary reputation with the short story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). These stories offered not only a sociological portrait of a specific Southern culture but also furthered the legacy of the American short story as a uniquely vital and complex narrative genre. But it was with the publication of her second and final novel The Awakening
(1899) that she gained notoriety of a different sort. The novel not only shocked audiences with its frank and unsentimental portrayal of female sexuality and psychology. It paved the way for the Southern novel as both a serious genre (based in the realism that had dominated the western novel since Balzac) and one that tackled the complex and untidy emotional lives of its characters. Today she is widely regarded as not only one of the most important female writers in American literature, but one of the most important chroniclers of the post-Civil War South and one of the first writers to treat the female experience complexity and without condescension.
During the first half of the 20th Century, the lawyer, politician, minister, orator, actor, and author Thomas Dixon, Jr.
wrote a number of novels, plays, sermons, and non-fiction pieces which were quite popular with the general public all over the USA. Today Dixon is perhaps best known for writing a trilogy of novels about Reconstruction, one of which was entitled The Clansman
(1905), a book which would eventually become the inspiration for D. W. Griffith
's infamous 1915 film The Birth of a Nation
. Overall Dixon wrote 22 novels, numerous plays and film scripts, Christian sermons, and some non-fiction works during his lifetime.
, Katherine Anne Porter
, Caroline Gordon
, Allen Tate
, Thomas Wolfe
, Robert Penn Warren
, and Tennessee Williams
, among others. Because of the distance the Southern Renaissance
authors had from the American Civil War
and slavery
, they were more objective in their writings about the South. During the 1920s, Southern poetry thrived under the Vanderbilt University
"Fugitives." In nonfiction, H.L. Mencken's popularity increased nationwide as he shocked and astounded readers with his satiric writing highlighting the inability of the South to produce anything of cultural value. In reaction to Mencken's essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart," the Southern Agrarians
(also based mostly around Vanderbilt) called for a return to the South's agrarian past and bemoaned the rise of Southern industrialism and urbanization. They noted that creativity and industrialism weren't compatible and desired the return to a lifestyle that would afford the Southerner leisure (a quality the Agrarians most felt conducive to creativity). Writers like Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1949, also brought new techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their writings. For instance, his novel As I Lay Dying is told by changing narrators ranging from the deceased Addie to her young son.
The late 1930s also saw the publication of one of the best-known Southern novels, Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
. The novel
, published in 1936, quickly became a bestseller. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize, and in 1939 an equally famous movie
of the novel premiered. Southern literature became popular across genres; children's books like Ezekiel, published in 1937 by writer/illustrators like Elvira Garner
, drew audiences outside the South.
began to be accepted as part of Southern literature, including African Americans such as Zora Neale Hurston
and Sterling Allen Brown
, along with women such as Eudora Welty
, Flannery O'Connor
, Ellen Glasgow
, Carson McCullers
, Katherine Anne Porter
, and Shirley Ann Grau
, among many others. Other well-known Southern writers of this period include Reynolds Price
, James Dickey
, William Price Fox
, Davis Grubb
, Walker Percy
, and William Styron
. One of the most highly praised Southern novels of the 20th century, To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
, won the Pulitzer Prize
when it was published in 1960. Another famous novel of the 1960s is A Confederacy of Dunces
, written by New Orleans native John Kennedy Toole
in the 1960s but not published until 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1981 and has since become a cult classic
.
"It has become a cliche in commentaries on the South, New South, or Sunbelt, that the region has lost its distinctiveness and has been absorbed into the mainstream of America. We are even told that we can no longer speak of southern sensibility. Yet everyone who looks at our literature is immediately struck by differences, sometimes subtle but often obvious enough, that set us apart form the rest of the nation. For instance, there is the southern language that colors our fiction or the southern novelists' emphasis on racial themes and narratives centered around family."
Southern poetry bloomed in the decades following the Second World War in large part thanks to the writing and efforts of Robert Penn Warren
and James Dickey
. Where earlier work primarily championed a white, agrarian past, the efforts of such poets as Dave Smith, Charles Wright
, Ellen Bryant Voigt
, Yusef Komunyakaa
, Jim Seay, Kate Daniels
, James Applewhite
, Betty Adcock
and Rodney Jones
have opened up the subject matter and form of Southern poetry.
are not ashamed of making a point of their own southernness; their nationwide popularity has been attributed to their southern appeal
Others, though, say that the very fabric of the South has changed so much that the old assumptions about southern literature no longer hold. For example, Truman Capote
, born and raised in the Deep South
, is best known for his novel In Cold Blood, a piece with none of the characteristics associated with "southern writing." Other southern writers, such as popular author John Grisham
, rarely write about traditional southern literary issues. John Berendt
, who wrote the popular Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
, is not a Southerner.
Among today's prominent southern writers are Tim Gautreaux
, William Gay
, Padgett Powell
, Pat Conroy
, Fannie Flagg
, Randall Kenan
, Ernest Gaines
, John Grisham
, Mary Hood
, Lee Smith
, Tom Robbins
, Tom Wolfe
, Wendell Berry
, Cormac McCarthy
, Ron Rash
, Chris Offutt, Barry Hannah
, Anne Rice
, Edward P. Jones
, Barbara Kingsolver
, Margaret Maron
,, R.B. Morris, Anne Tyler
, Larry Brown
, Allan Gurganus
, Clyde Edgerton
, Daniel Wallace
, Kaye Gibbons
, Winston Groom
, Lewis Nordan
, Richard Ford
, Ferrol Sams
, Natasha Trethewey
, Olympia Vernon
, and Jesmyn Ward
, who won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel, Salvage the Bones.
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
about the Southern United States
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
or by writers from this region. Characteristics of Southern literature include a focus on a common Southern history, the significance of family
Family
In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...
, a sense of community
Community
The term community has two distinct meanings:*a group of interacting people, possibly living in close proximity, and often refers to a group that shares some common values, and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household...
and one’s role within it, a sense of justice, the region's dominant religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
(Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
— see Protestantism
Protestantism
Protestantism is one of the three major groupings within Christianity. It is a movement that began in Germany in the early 16th century as a reaction against medieval Roman Catholic doctrines and practices, especially in regards to salvation, justification, and ecclesiology.The doctrines of the...
) and the burdens/rewards religion often brings, issues of racial tension
Racism in the United States
Racism in the United States has been a major issue since the colonial era and the slave era. Legally sanctioned racism imposed a heavy burden on Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latin Americans...
, land and the promise it brings, a sense of social class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
and place, and the use of the Southern dialect
Southern American English
Southern American English is a group of dialects of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from Southern and Eastern Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast, and from the Atlantic coast to most of Texas and Oklahoma.The Southern dialects make...
.
Overview of Southern literature
In its simplest form, Southern literature consists of writing about the American South—the South being defined, for historical as well as geographical reasons, as the states of South CarolinaSouth Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
, Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
, Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
, Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
, North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
, Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
, Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
, Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
, Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
, Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
, Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...
, West Virginia
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...
and Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
. Pre-Civil War definitions of the South often included Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
, Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
, and Delaware
Delaware
Delaware is a U.S. state located on the Atlantic Coast in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is bordered to the south and west by Maryland, and to the north by Pennsylvania...
as well.
In addition to the geographical component of Southern literature, certain themes have appeared because of the similar histories of the Southern states in regard to slavery, the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, and Reconstruction. The conservative culture in the South has also produced a strong focus within Southern literature on the significance of family, religion, community in one's personal and social life, the use of the Southern dialect
Southern American English
Southern American English is a group of dialects of the English language spoken throughout the Southern region of the United States, from Southern and Eastern Maryland, West Virginia and Kentucky to the Gulf Coast, and from the Atlantic coast to most of Texas and Oklahoma.The Southern dialects make...
, and a strong sense of "place." The South
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
's troubled history with racial issues also continually appears in its literature.
Despite these common themes, there is debate as to what makes writers and their literature "Southern". For example, Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
, arguably the father of Southern literature , defined the characteristics that many people associate with Southern writing in his novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He even referred to himself as a "Southern writer". In addition, many famous Southern writers headed to the Northern U.S. as soon as they were old enough to make it on their own. So while geography is a factor, the geographical birth of the author is not the defining factor in Southern writing.
Early and antebellum literature
During the 17th and 18th centuries, English colonists in the Southern part of the American colonies produced a number of notable works. Two of the most famous were early memoirs of VirginiaVirginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
: Captain John Smith
John Smith of Jamestown
Captain John Smith Admiral of New England was an English soldier, explorer, and author. He was knighted for his services to Sigismund Bathory, Prince of Transylvania and friend Mózes Székely...
's account of the founding of Jamestown in the 1610s and 1620s, and William Byrd II
William Byrd II
Colonel William Byrd II was a planter, slave-owner and author from Charles City County, Virginia. He is considered the founder of Richmond, Virginia.-Biography:...
's secret plantation diary, kept in the early 18th century. Both sets of recollections are critical documents in early Southern history.
After American independence, in the early 19th century, the expansion of cotton planting and slavery began to distinguish Southern society and culture more clearly from the rest of the young republic. During this antebellum period, South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
, and particularly the city of Charleston, rivaled and perhaps surpassed Virginia as a literary community. Writing in Charleston, the lawyer and essayist Hugh Swinton Legare, the poets Paul Hamilton Hayne
Paul Hamilton Hayne
Paul Hamilton Hayne was a nineteenth century Southern American poet, critic, and editor.-Biography:Paul Hamilton Hayne was born in Charleston, South Carolina on January 1, 1830. After losing his father as a young child, Hayne was reared by his mother in the home of his prosperous and prominent...
and Henry Timrod
Henry Timrod
Henry Timrod was an American poet, often called the poet laureate of the Confederacy.-Biography:Timrod was born on December 8, 1828, in Charleston, South Carolina, to a family of German descent. His grandfather Heinrich Dimroth emigrated to the United States in 1765 and Anglicized his name...
, and the novelist William Gilmore Simms
William Gilmore Simms
William Gilmore Simms was a poet, novelist and historian from the American South. His writings achieved great prominence during the 19th century, with Edgar Allan Poe pronouncing him the best novelist America had ever produced...
composed some of the most important works in antebellum Southern literature.
Simms was a particularly significant figure, perhaps the most prominent Southern author before the American Civil War
Civil war
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same nation state or republic, or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly-united nation state....
. His novels of frontier life and the American revolution celebrated the history of South Carolina. Like James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo...
, Simms was strongly influenced by Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
, and his works bore the imprint of Scott's heroic romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
. In The Yemassee, The Kinsmen, and the anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin
Anti-Tom literature
Anti-Tom literature refers to the 19th century pro-slavery novels and other literary works written in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Also called Plantation literature, these writings were generally written by authors from the Southern United States...
novel The Sword and the Distaff, Simms presented idealized portraits of slavery and Southern life. While popular and well regarded in South Carolina—and highly praised by such critics as Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
-- Simms never gained a large national audience.
Some critics regard Poe himself as a Southern author—he was raised in Richmond, attended the University of Virginia, and edited the Southern Literary Messenger
Southern Literary Messenger
The Southern Literary Messenger was a periodical published in Richmond, Virginia, from 1834 until June 1864. Each issue carried a subtitle of "Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts" or some variation and included poetry, fiction, non-fiction, reviews, and historical notes...
from 1835 to 1837. Yet in his poetry and fiction Poe rarely took up distinctively Southern themes or subjects; his status as a "Southern" writer remains ambiguous.
In the Chesapeake region, meanwhile, antebellum authors of enduring interest include John Pendleton Kennedy, whose novel Swallow Barn offered a colorful sketch of Virginia plantation life; and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker was an American author, judge, legal scholar, and political essayist.-Life and Politics:...
, whose 1836 work The Partisan Leader
The Partisan Leader
The Partisan Leader; A Tale of The Future is a political novel by the antebellum Virginia author and jurist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. A two-volume work published in 1836 in New York City and in 1837 in Washington, D.C...
foretold the secession of the Southern states, and imagined a guerrilla war in Virginia between federal and secessionist armies.
Not all noteworthy Southern authors during this period were white. Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing...
's Narrative is perhaps the most famous first-person account of black slavery in the antebellum South. Harriet Jacobs, meanwhile, recounted her experiences in bondage in North Carolina in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a book that was published in 1861 by Harriet Jacobs, using the pen name "Linda Brent". While on one level it chronicles the experiences of Harriet Jacobs as a slave, and the various humiliations she had to endure in that unhappy state, it also deals with...
. And another Southern-born ex-slave, William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer...
, wrote Clotel; or, The President's Daughter -- widely believed to be the first novel ever published by an African-American. The book depicts the life of its title character, a daughter of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
and his black mistress, and her struggles under slavery.
The "Lost Cause" years
In the second half of the 19th century, the South lost the Civil War and suffered through what many white southerners considered a harsh occupation (called Reconstruction). In place of the Anti-Tom literature came poetry and novels about the "Lost Cause of the ConfederacyLost Cause of the Confederacy
The Lost Cause is the name commonly given to an American literary and intellectual movement that sought to reconcile the traditional white society of the U.S. South to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War of 1861–1865...
." This nostalgic literature began to appear almost immediately after the war ended; The Conquered Banner
The Conquered Banner
The Conquered Banner was the most popular of the post-Civil War Confederate poems. It was written by Roman Catholic priest and Confederate Army chaplain, Father Abram Joseph Ryan, who is sometimes called the "poet laureate of the postwar south" and "poet-priest of the Confederacy."The poem was...
was published on June 24, 1865. These writers idealized the defeated South and its lost culture. Prominent writers with this point of view included poets Henry Timrod
Henry Timrod
Henry Timrod was an American poet, often called the poet laureate of the Confederacy.-Biography:Timrod was born on December 8, 1828, in Charleston, South Carolina, to a family of German descent. His grandfather Heinrich Dimroth emigrated to the United States in 1765 and Anglicized his name...
, Daniel B. Lucas
Daniel B. Lucas
Daniel Bedinger Lucas , was a poet and lawyer from West Virginia. He was the son of United States Senator William Lucas....
, Abram Joseph Ryan
Abram Joseph Ryan
Abram Joseph Ryan , OSFS, was an American poet, an active proponent of the Confederate States of America, and a Roman Catholic priest...
, and Sidney Lanier
Sidney Lanier
Sidney Lanier was an American musician and poet.-Biography:Sidney Lanier was born February 3, 1842, in Macon, Georgia, to parents Robert Sampson Lanier and Mary Jane Anderson; he was mostly of English ancestry. His distant French Huguenot ancestors immigrated to England in the 16th century...
and fiction writer Thomas Nelson Page
Thomas Nelson Page
Thomas Nelson Page was a lawyer and American writer. He also served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, including the important period of World War I.-Biography:...
. Others, like African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
writer Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South, where the legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free...
, dismissed this nostalgia
Nostalgia
The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, often in idealized form.The word is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of , meaning "returning home", a Homeric word, and , meaning "pain, ache"...
by pointing out the racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
and exploitation of blacks that happened during this time period in the South.
In 1884, Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
published what is arguably the most influential southern novel of the 19th century, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
said of the novel, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." This statement applies even more to southern literature because of the novel's frank dealings with issues such as race and violence.
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty , was an American author of short stories and novels. She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century....
was another central figure in post-Civil War Southern literature. Focusing her writing largely on the Acadian/Cajun communities of Louisiana, Chopin established her literary reputation with the short story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). These stories offered not only a sociological portrait of a specific Southern culture but also furthered the legacy of the American short story as a uniquely vital and complex narrative genre. But it was with the publication of her second and final novel The Awakening
The Awakening (novel)
The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899 . Set in New Orleans and the Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the plot centers around Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the...
(1899) that she gained notoriety of a different sort. The novel not only shocked audiences with its frank and unsentimental portrayal of female sexuality and psychology. It paved the way for the Southern novel as both a serious genre (based in the realism that had dominated the western novel since Balzac) and one that tackled the complex and untidy emotional lives of its characters. Today she is widely regarded as not only one of the most important female writers in American literature, but one of the most important chroniclers of the post-Civil War South and one of the first writers to treat the female experience complexity and without condescension.
During the first half of the 20th Century, the lawyer, politician, minister, orator, actor, and author Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. was an American Baptist minister, playwright, lecturer, North Carolina state legislator, lawyer, and author, perhaps best known for writing The Clansman — which was to become the inspiration for D. W...
wrote a number of novels, plays, sermons, and non-fiction pieces which were quite popular with the general public all over the USA. Today Dixon is perhaps best known for writing a trilogy of novels about Reconstruction, one of which was entitled The Clansman
The Clansman
The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is the title of a novel published in 1905. It was the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. that included The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor. It was influential in providing the ideology that helped support the...
(1905), a book which would eventually become the inspiration for D. W. Griffith
D. W. Griffith
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance .Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera...
's infamous 1915 film The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation is a 1915 American silent film directed by D. W. Griffith and based on the novel and play The Clansman, both by Thomas Dixon, Jr. Griffith also co-wrote the screenplay , and co-produced the film . It was released on February 8, 1915...
. Overall Dixon wrote 22 novels, numerous plays and film scripts, Christian sermons, and some non-fiction works during his lifetime.
The Southern Renaissance
In the 1920s and 1930s, a renaissance in Southern literature began with the appearance of writers such as William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim...
, Caroline Gordon
Caroline Gordon
Caroline Ferguson Gordon was a notable American novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, was the recipient of two prestigious literary awards, a 1932 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1934 O...
, Allen Tate
Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...
, Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing...
, Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
, and Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
, among others. Because of the distance the Southern Renaissance
Southern Renaissance
The Southern Renaissance was the reinvigoration of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Penn Warren, among...
authors had from the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
and slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
, they were more objective in their writings about the South. During the 1920s, Southern poetry thrived under the Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt
-People:*Vanderbilt *The Vanderbilt family**Cornelius Vanderbilt**William H. Vanderbilt-Places:In the United States:*Vanderbilt, California, a former gold-mining town*Vanderbilt, Michigan, a village*Vanderbilt, Pennsylvania, a borough...
"Fugitives." In nonfiction, H.L. Mencken's popularity increased nationwide as he shocked and astounded readers with his satiric writing highlighting the inability of the South to produce anything of cultural value. In reaction to Mencken's essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart," the Southern Agrarians
Southern Agrarians
The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...
(also based mostly around Vanderbilt) called for a return to the South's agrarian past and bemoaned the rise of Southern industrialism and urbanization. They noted that creativity and industrialism weren't compatible and desired the return to a lifestyle that would afford the Southerner leisure (a quality the Agrarians most felt conducive to creativity). Writers like Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
in 1949, also brought new techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their writings. For instance, his novel As I Lay Dying is told by changing narrators ranging from the deceased Addie to her young son.
The late 1930s also saw the publication of one of the best-known Southern novels, Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind
The slaves depicted in Gone with the Wind are primarily loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork and Uncle Peter, and these slaves stay on with their masters even after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 sets them free...
by Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American author and journalist. Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 for her epic American Civil War era novel, Gone with the Wind, which was the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.-Family:Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta,...
. The novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, published in 1936, quickly became a bestseller. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize, and in 1939 an equally famous movie
Gone with the Wind (film)
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...
of the novel premiered. Southern literature became popular across genres; children's books like Ezekiel, published in 1937 by writer/illustrators like Elvira Garner
Elvira Garner
Elvira Garner was a 20th century Florida author and watercolor illustrator. Her best-known children's book Ezekiel, published by Henry Holt in 1937, detailed the story of a black boy who lived in Sanford, Florida with his Mammy, Pappy and sister Emancipation...
, drew audiences outside the South.
Post World War II Southern Literature
Southern literature following the Second World War grew thematically as it embraced the social and cultural changes in the South resulting from the American Civil Rights Movement. In addition, more female and African American writersAfrican American literature
African-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late 18th century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem...
began to be accepted as part of Southern literature, including African Americans such as Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance...
and Sterling Allen Brown
Sterling Allen Brown
Sterling Allen Brown was an African-American professor, author of works on folklore, poet and literary critic. He was interested chiefly in black culture of the Southern United States.-Early life:...
, along with women such as Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
, Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...
, Ellen Glasgow
Ellen Glasgow
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist who portrayed the changing world of the contemporary south.-Biography:...
, Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers was an American writer. She wrote novels, short stories, and two plays, as well as essays and some poetry. Her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South...
, Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim...
, and Shirley Ann Grau
Shirley Ann Grau
Shirley Ann Grau Born in New Orleans, her work is set primarily in the Deep South, and explores issues of race and gender. She spent much of her childhood in rural Alabama with her mother. She graduated in 1950 from Newcomb College of Tulane University. Her 1964 saga The Keepers of the House was...
, among many others. Other well-known Southern writers of this period include Reynolds Price
Reynolds Price
Reynolds Price was an American novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist and the James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University. Apart from English literature, Price had a lifelong interest in ancient languages and Biblical scholarship...
, James Dickey
James Dickey
James Lafayette Dickey was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966.-Early years:...
, William Price Fox
William Price Fox
William Price Fox is an American novelist, who wrote Southern Fried and Doctor Golf. Fox has contributed to publications such as Sports Illustrated, L.A. Times, USA Today and Atlantic Monthly...
, Davis Grubb
Davis Grubb
Davis Grubb was an American novelist and short story writer.-Biography:Born in Moundsville, West Virginia, Grubb wanted to combine his creative skills as a painter with writing and as such attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania...
, Walker Percy
Walker Percy
Walker Percy was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is best known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962...
, and William Styron
William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, which included...
. One of the most highly praised Southern novels of the 20th century, To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. It was instantly successful, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and has become a classic of modern American literature...
by Harper Lee
Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee is an American author known for her 1960 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that were observed by the author as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama...
, won the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
when it was published in 1960. Another famous novel of the 1960s is A Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel written by John Kennedy Toole, published by LSU Press in 1980, 11 years after the author's suicide. The book was published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy and Toole's mother Thelma Toole, quickly becoming a cult classic, and later a...
, written by New Orleans native John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, best-known for his posthumously published novel A Confederacy of Dunces. He also wrote The Neon Bible. Although several people in the literary world felt his writing skills were praiseworthy, Toole's novels were rejected...
in the 1960s but not published until 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It originated as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, which was awarded between 1918 and 1947.-1910s:...
in 1981 and has since become a cult classic
Cult Classic
Cult Classic is a Blue Öyster Cult studio recording released in 1994, containing remakes of many of the band's previous hits.-Track listing:# " The Reaper" - 5:05# "E.T.I...
.
"It has become a cliche in commentaries on the South, New South, or Sunbelt, that the region has lost its distinctiveness and has been absorbed into the mainstream of America. We are even told that we can no longer speak of southern sensibility. Yet everyone who looks at our literature is immediately struck by differences, sometimes subtle but often obvious enough, that set us apart form the rest of the nation. For instance, there is the southern language that colors our fiction or the southern novelists' emphasis on racial themes and narratives centered around family."
Southern poetry bloomed in the decades following the Second World War in large part thanks to the writing and efforts of Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
and James Dickey
James Dickey
James Lafayette Dickey was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966.-Early years:...
. Where earlier work primarily championed a white, agrarian past, the efforts of such poets as Dave Smith, Charles Wright
Charles Wright (poet)
Charles Wright is an American poet whose awards include the National Book Award Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet whose awards include the National Book Award Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet whose awards include the National Book Award (19830 for...
, Ellen Bryant Voigt
Ellen Bryant Voigt
Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet. She has published six collections of poetry and a collection of craft essays. Her poetry collection Shadow of Heaven was a finalist for the National Book Award and Kyrie was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poetry has been...
, Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet who currently teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly...
, Jim Seay, Kate Daniels
Kate Daniels
for the Kate Daniels urban fantasy mystery series, see Ilona AndrewsKate Daniels is an American poet.-Life:...
, James Applewhite
James Applewhite
James Applewhite is an American poet, and Professor Emeritus in creative writing at Duke University.He graduated from Duke University with a B.A., M.A...
, Betty Adcock
Betty Adcock
Elizabeth "Betty" Sharp Adcock is an American poet and a 2002–2003 Guggenheim Fellow. Author of six poetry collections, she has served as a faculty member in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, NC and in the Writer-in-Residence program at Meredith College in...
and Rodney Jones
Rodney Jones
Rodney Jones is an American poet and professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Jones was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Peter I.B...
have opened up the subject matter and form of Southern poetry.
Contemporary Southern literature
Today, in the early twenty-first century, the American South is undergoing a number of cultural and social changes, including rapid industrialization/deindustrialization and an influx of immigrants. As a result, the exact definition of what constitutes southern literature is changing. Some critics specify that the previous definitions of southern literature still hold, with some of them suggesting, only somewhat in jest, that all southern literature must still contain a dead mule within its pages. Still, the successful crime novels of James Lee BurkeJames Lee Burke
James Lee Burke is an American author of mysteries, best known for his Dave Robicheaux series. He has won an Edgar Award for Black Cherry Blues and Cimarron Rose . The Robicheaux character has been portrayed twice on screen, first by Alec Baldwin and then Tommy Lee Jones...
are not ashamed of making a point of their own southernness; their nationwide popularity has been attributed to their southern appeal
Others, though, say that the very fabric of the South has changed so much that the old assumptions about southern literature no longer hold. For example, Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
, born and raised in the Deep South
Deep South
The Deep South is a descriptive category of the cultural and geographic subregions in the American South. Historically, it is differentiated from the "Upper South" as being the states which were most dependent on plantation type agriculture during the pre-Civil War period...
, is best known for his novel In Cold Blood, a piece with none of the characteristics associated with "southern writing." Other southern writers, such as popular author John Grisham
John Grisham
John Ray Grisham, Jr. is an American lawyer and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers.John Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University before attending the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981 and practiced criminal law for about a decade...
, rarely write about traditional southern literary issues. John Berendt
John Berendt
John Berendt is an American author, known for writing the best-selling non-fiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction....
, who wrote the popular Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a non-fiction work by John Berendt. Published in 1994, the book was Berendt's first, and became a The New York Times bestseller for 216 weeks following its debut....
, is not a Southerner.
Among today's prominent southern writers are Tim Gautreaux
Tim Gautreaux
Timothy Martin Gautreaux is a novelist and short story writer who lives in Hammond, Louisiana, where he is Writer in Residence at Southeastern Louisiana University....
, William Gay
William Gay (author)
William Gay is an American writer of novels and short stories.-Life and career:Gay was born in Hohenwald, Tennessee, which he still calls home. After high school, Gay joined the United States Navy and served during the Vietnam War...
, Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell
Padgett Powell is an American novelist in the Southern literary tradition. His debut novel, Edisto , was nominated for the American Book Award and was excerpted in The New Yorker. Powell has written four more novels—including Edisto Revisited , a sequel to his debut, Mrs...
, Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy , is a New York Times bestselling author who has written several acclaimed novels and memoirs. Two of his novels, The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, were made into Oscar-nominated films.-Early life:...
, Fannie Flagg
Fannie Flagg
Patricia Neal , known professionally as Fannie Flagg, is an American actress, comedienne and author. She is perhaps best-known for the 1988 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which was adapted into the 1991 movie Fried Green Tomatoes; Flagg was nominated for an Academy Award for...
, Randall Kenan
Randall Kenan
Randall Kenan is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. Raised in a rural community in North Carolina, Kenan has focused his fiction on what it means to be black and gay in the southern United States. Among his books is the collection of short stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was...
, Ernest Gaines
Ernest Gaines
Ernest James Gaines is an African-American author. His works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese. Four of his works have been made into television movies.His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the...
, John Grisham
John Grisham
John Ray Grisham, Jr. is an American lawyer and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers.John Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University before attending the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981 and practiced criminal law for about a decade...
, Mary Hood
Mary Hood
Mary Hood is an award-winning fiction writer of predominantly Southern literature, who has authored two short story collections - How Far She Went and And Venus is Blue - and a novel, Familiar Heat...
, Lee Smith
Lee Smith (author)
Lee Smith is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her home roots in the Southeastern United States in her works of literature. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the North...
, Tom Robbins
Tom Robbins
Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins (born July 22, 1936 is an American author. His best-selling novels are serio-comic, often wildly poetic stories with a strong social and philosophical undercurrent, an irreverent bent, and scenes extrapolated from...
, Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Early life and education:...
, Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays...
, Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and modernist genres. He received the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road...
, Ron Rash
Ron Rash
Ron Rash , an American poet, short story writer and novelist, is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. Rash was born in Chester, South Carolina, in 1953, grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and is a graduate of Gardner-Webb...
, Chris Offutt, Barry Hannah
Barry Hannah
Howard Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.The author of eight novels and five short story collections , Hannah worked with notable American editors and publishers such as Gordon Lish, Seymour Lawrence, and Morgan Entrekin...
, Anne Rice
Anne Rice
Anne Rice is a best-selling Southern American author of metaphysical gothic fiction, Christian literature and erotica from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history...
, Edward P. Jones
Edward P. Jones
Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. His 2003 novel The Known World received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.-Biography:...
, Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the former Republic of Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before...
, Margaret Maron
Margaret Maron
Margaret Maron is an American writer, the author of award-winning mystery novels.-Biography:Maron was born and grew up in central North Carolina. She has also lived in Italy. She and her husband, artist Joe Maron, lived in Brooklyn before returning to her home state where they now...
,, R.B. Morris, Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler is an American novelist.Tyler, the eldest of four children, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father was a chemist and her mother a social worker. Her early childhood was spent in a succession of Quaker communities in the mountains of North Carolina and in Raleigh...
, Larry Brown
Larry Brown (author)
Larry Brown was an American novelist, non-fiction and short story writer. He was a winner of numerous awards including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award, and Mississippi's Governor's Award For Excellence in the Arts...
, Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus
Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina. His writing has been compared to the work of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, who also were identified with the American South.-Biography: Gurganus was...
, Clyde Edgerton
Clyde Edgerton
Clyde Edgerton is an American author and English literature professor.Born in Durham, North Carolina, his books are known for endearing characters, small-town Southern dialogue and realistic fire and brimstone religious sermons...
, Daniel Wallace
Daniel Wallace (author)
Daniel Wallace is an American author, best known for his 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, the basis for the Tim Burton film Big Fish. His other books include Ray in Reverse and The Watermelon King...
, Kaye Gibbons
Kaye Gibbons
Kaye Gibbons is an American novelist. Her 1987 debut, Ellen Foster, received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and the The Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing from...
, Winston Groom
Winston Groom
Winston F. Groom, Jr. is an American novelist and non-fiction writer, best known for his book Forrest Gump, which was adapted into a film in 1994.- Life :...
, Lewis Nordan
Lewis Nordan
Lewis Nordan grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He is a graduate of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair...
, Richard Ford
Richard Ford
Richard Ford is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories.-Early...
, Ferrol Sams
Ferrol Sams
Ferrol Aubrey Sams, Jr. is an American physician and novelist born in Fayette County, Georgia, U.S.A.-Early life and education:...
, Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her 2006 collection, Native Guard.Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She earned the A.B. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in poetry from Hollins University, and an M.F.A. in poetry from...
, Olympia Vernon
Olympia Vernon
Olympia Vernon is an African-American author who has published three novels: Eden , Logic , and A Killing In This Town . Eden won the 2004 Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Vernon was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and grew up in Mount...
, and Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction with Salvage the Bones, a novel about familial love and community in the 12 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. An assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama, she is currently...
, who won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel, Salvage the Bones.
Selected journals
- Black Warrior ReviewBlack Warrior ReviewThe Black Warrior Review is an American literary magazine founded in 1974 and based at the University of Alabama. Work appearing in BWR has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize collection, The Best American Short Stories , Best American Poetry, New Stories from the South. The Spring 1978 issue...
- Published by University of Alabama - Broad River Review - Published by Gardner-Webb University
- Southern Literary Journal and Monthly MagazineSouthern Literary Journal and Monthly MagazineSouthern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine was a journal founded in 1835 by Daniel K. Whitaker and published until 1837 by J.S. Burges from Charleston, South Carolina....
— (1835–1837) - Sewanee ReviewSewanee ReviewThe Sewanee Review is a literary journal established in 1892 and the oldest continuously published periodical of its kind in the United States. It incorporates original fiction and poetry, as well as essays, reviews, and literary criticism...
— America's oldest continuously published literary quarterly (published at the University of the South) - Southern Literary JournalSouthern Literary JournalSouthern Literary Journal was established in 1968 by editors Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and C. Hugh Holman....
— (1964–present) - Mississippi QuarterlyMississippi QuarterlyThe Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that mainly covers Southern history and literature. Originally entitled Social Sciences Bulletin, it was established in 1948 by John K. Bettersworth, who was associated with the journal until his death...
— A refereed, scholarly journal dedicated to the life and culture of the American South, past and present. http://www.missq.msstate.edu/ - The Oxford AmericanOxford AmericanThe Oxford American is an American quarterly literary magazine "dedicated to featuring the very best in Southern writing while documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South."-First publication:...
— A quarterly journal of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, and music from and about the South. - The Southern Review — The famous literary journal focusing on southern literature. http://www.lsu.edu/thesouthernreview/
- storySouthStorySouthstorySouth is an online quarterly literary magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, criticism, essays, and visual artwork, with a focus on the Southern United States. The journal also runs the annual Million Writers Award to select the best short stories published each year in online magazines or...
— A journal of new writings from the American South. Features fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and more. http://www.storysouth.com - Dead Mule School of Southern Literature — Showcases all aspects of southern writing from contemporary voices to cliched vernacular, from short fiction, poetry, and essays to photography. http://www.deadmule.com
- Southern Cultures — Journal from the Center for the Study of the American South http://www.unc.edu/depts/csas/southern_cultures/
- Southern Literary Review — Book reviews, profiles of southern authors, and a directory of southern authors by state. http://www.southernlitreview.com/
- Southern Scribe — News and reviews about southern literature (including a helpful calendar of pertinent events). http://www.southernscribe.com
- Southern SpacesSouthern SpacesSouthern Spaces is a peer-reviewed open-access academic journal that publishes articles, photo essays and images, presentations, and short videos about real and imagined spaces and places of the Southern United States and their connections to the wider world...
— Peer-Reviewed Internet journal examining the spaces and places of the American South. http://www.southernspaces.org/ - SouthernGrit — A new on-line literary journal devoted to southern literature. http://www.southerngrit.org
- 500500Year 500 was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Patricius and Hypatius...
— The short story blog from The Southern Writer's Group. http://500.southernwritersgroup.org - A Streetcar Named Desire.
Further reading
- Southern Literature From 1579-1895 by Louise Manly
- Anderson, Eric Gary. "On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession" Southern Spaces. August 9, 2007.
- "Caroline Lee Hentz's Long Journey" by Philip D. Beidler. Alabama Heritage Number 75, Winter 2005.
- The Companion to Southern Literature: Themes, Genres, Places, People, Movements, and Motifs. Edited by Joseph Flora, Lucinda MacKethan, Todd Taylor, and Todd W. Taylor. Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
- Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris. University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
- The History of Southern Literature by Louis Rubin. Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
- The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition: What Every American Needs to Know Edited by James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, and E. D. Hirsch. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
- "Genres of Southern Literature" by Lucinda MacKethan. Southern Spaces, Feb. 2004.
- Walker Percy and Southern Literature. Explores the overall issues surrounding what makes for southern literature.
- Am I a Southerner? Pop culture article discussing Southern cultural mores in literature and in general.
- History of Southern Literature online publishing. Since 1995 the American South has relied on the School of Southern Literature.
- Where is the South in Today's Southern Literature? Article exploring 2002 changes in southern literature.
- The Dead Mule Rides Again Explanation of what constitutes "good" southern writing.
External links
- The Fellowship of Southern Writers
- Library of Southern Literature, University of North Carolina American Southern literature pre-1929.
- Emory University Archives Manuscript sources for southern literature.
- List of the 125 greatest southern books
- List of Georgia Authors
- The Center for Southern Literature
- Society for the Study of Southern Literature
- A Checklist of Scholarship on Southern Literature An checklist of scholarship on writers associated with the American South. Sponsored by Mississippi Quarterly.
- Adjudicated List of Contemporary Southern Authors Registry of Southern writers nominated by their state arts councilArts councilAn arts council is a government or private, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts mainly by funding local artists, awarding prizes, and organizing events at home and abroad...
based on the quality of their work. - Southern Gothic Shorts Short Story Writing Competition
- Greatest Southern Writers - slideshow by Life magazine
- Southern Poetry from Holman Prison Death Row Inmate Darrell Grayson
- "Poets in Place," at Southern Spaces.
- Lucinda MacKethan, "Genres of Southern Literature", Southern Spaces, 16 February 2004. http://southernspaces.org/2004/genres-southern-literature