Writers of the American South - Literature by Region

Southern writers: The list of American southern writers is long indeed. It boasts one Nobel Prize winner and numerous Pulitzers: William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, James Agee, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, Conrad Aiken, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, David Baldacci

Before we discuss the writers individually, it is interesting to consider the culture that produced so many big names, big books, and powerful works of art.

* In the United States of America, no region has been more stereotyped or mocked than the American south. This may be due to the cultural nature of the region. The south possessed a rigid social order and insisted on its own gentility throughout the antebellum period. Even in defeat, the culture of the south claimed righteousness and nobility.

Suffering through the upheavals and the poverty of Reconstruction, the American south was isolated and individual. It was a region apart - gaining its distinctions in a way that is difficult to articulate and which found this little corner of the world clinging to past glory, vindicating itself constantly against those who would deride its morality, its dignity, and its funny accent.

Of the writers on the list of writers of the American south, several demonstrate the very "southern" trait of defensive self-vindication. William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Robert Penn Warren can each be said to have written in "defense of the south". Each of these writers presented the situation of racial inequality as being, in some way, natural because it was historic; authentic because it was ingrained. None of them come out to say that slavery or rampant racism were right, however.

The moral stance is one of precarious balance. It is a protestation of innocence more than it is a justification of slavery and racial intolerance.

Reading Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, one gets a sense of the weight of inheritance in the American south. Patriarchy, family, and history are the great themes of both William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. A contrary impulse - an impulse to gain separation and self-definition - characterizes some of the other writers on the list, such as Tennessee Williams and Thomas Wolfe.

We can see through this impulse again the weight of the southern inheritance. If they weren't writing in defense of their own history, writers of the American south were writing to escape from it. History, it would seem, belongs to the American south, whether their artists want it or not.

* William Faulkner is perhaps the greatest American writer, ever. Author of a series of masterpieces, Faulkner took stream-of-consciousness writing to un-thought of places, constructing a branch of literature of his own, practically a language-art of his own, and who stands to become the most widely studied American writer in college programs both at home and abroad.

Faulkner was a contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but he did not fully partake of the "ex-partriot" movement as they did. Though Faulkner visited Europe when Paris represented a rite-of-passage in American letters, he did not stay there as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos did.

Faulkner came home and took a job for a while and wrote like mad. His prose possesses a crazed urgency and a verve like no other writer of his time.

There is far too much to write about William Faulkner for the purposes of this article so we will simply list a few of his most worth-while accomplishments: Absalom, Absalom; As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, & Light in August.

* Flannery O'Connor was a short story writer who also happened to write a couple of novels. To read her own self-criticism, she was not a novelist and felt most at home in the short story form.

When you read her work, you can see what she means. Though her novels are the work of a masterful writer (The Violent Bear It Away: Wise Blood), they don't compare to her achievements with the short story form.

Ernest Hemingway is known as the number one, head-honcho of the American short-story. Raymond Carver's name is tossed in the discussion also. Flannery O'Connor is the first person I would put on the list of great American short-story writers. Everything That Rises Must Converge is a must read book for anyone serious about literature. In it are characters of profound clarity and depth. Always complex and presented with deft touch, the short-stories of Flannery O'Connor rival the best that anyone else has ever produced (I lay my hand on my heart when I say that because it is a solemn truth).

* James Agee is an interesting figure. He was known in his day (the 1940's & 1950's) as perhaps the "most talented writer" in America. He embarked on the now famous literary project for People Magazine, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", an ironically titled double effort wherein Agee traveled through the American south with a photographer to chronicle the lives and times of poor Americans.

The project became a book and made Agee a big name. For the rest of his life, Agee wrote for magazines and for Hollywood (I think), but didn't do anything major. His personality was famously captivating. He was a popular man. But he died young.

James Agee was working on a novel at the time of his death, A Death in the Family and the book won him a posthumous Pulitzer prize. It is a truly great book, full of pathos and raw emotion and strongly evocative the atmosphere of his own native Kentucky. A Death in the Family, with its penetrating and honest look at loss and grief, surely would have put Agee back on the map.

* There are too many writers on the list of writers of the American south to discuss each of them individually. The wealth of talent and artistry of southern writers is frankly impressive - astounding even.

But, we will have to hold off for another article to discuss Warren, Wright, Hurston, and the rest.