![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2023\/11\/download-5.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOne of the things many literary scholars have pondered is why it is that so many of the great novels and short stories that have been written since the Civil War have been written by Southern writers.\u00a0 The answer I was given at UNC is that the South is the only region of our country that has lost a major war on its own soil, which created a lot of angst, soul searching, pathos and pouring one\u2019s heart out on paper. So what follows in this post is a short list of some of that literature we all as Americans should know.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s start with the one that won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950\u2014 William Faulkner.\u00a0 Of his various novels, the one I would recommend is The Sound and the Fury\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>or if you only have time for a short story how about \u2018A Rose for Emily\u2019 or \u2018Shingles for the Lord\u2019?<\/p>\nHe may have been called Tennessee Williams, but actually he was from just down the road in Mississippi from where Faulkner was from, namely Columbus Ms.\u00a0 What he became famous for was his plays\u2013 \u2018Cat on a Hot Tin Roof\u2019,\u00a0 \u2018The Glass Menagerie\u2019\u00a0 \u2018A Streetcar Named Desire\u2019, \u2018Night of the Iguana\u2019.<\/p>\n
I must mention my fellow UNC alum Walker Percy, and what recommend his novel Love in the Ruins.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>He was from Birmingham Ala. and he came to Carolina with one of my distant cousins\u2014 the famous Civil War historian Shelby Foote from Greenville Ms.\u00a0 Shelby tells this hilarious story about he and Walker being interviewed as potential enrollees at UNC by Frank Porter Graham from Fayetteville N.C. He was then President at UNC (beginning in 1930), and later became a U.S. Senator and a big supporter of Martin Luther King Jr.\u00a0 \u00a0So, as the story goes, Porter asked Walker Percy the following: \u201cNow Chapel Hill is appropriately named, as it is a very Christian town. Mr. Percy you don\u2019t have any trouble believing in Jesus do you?\u00a0 \u00a0Walker smiled and said \u2018No Sir, it\u2019s God I have trouble believing in\u2019, to which Graham quipped, \u2018Good, you\u2019ll fit right in here in Chapel Hill\u2019.\u00a0 \u00a0Now, this is how Foote told the story, so it\u2019s not clear to me how much yeast he put in that dough to make it rise.<\/p>\nAnother writer, mainly of now famous short stories is Flannery O\u2019Conner, from Savannah Ga.\u00a0 Flannery was a Catholic, and a pot stirrer to be sure on the issue of racism, the besetting sin of the South.\u00a0 There are too many great short stories to mention so I\u2019d suggest starting with \u2018A Good Man is Hard to Find\u2019, and if novels are more your thing I\u2019d say read The Violent Bear It Away.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nYou may be wondering at this point, what about Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain from Missouri. I was coming to that, as he was required reading when I was growing up, whether the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or Huckleberry Finn, or The Innocents Abroad, or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court\u00a0 .\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>He was brilliant at satire, had a rapier sharp wit,\u00a0 but alas in our age of \u2018wokeness\u2019, somehow he is seen as not critical enough of slavery and racism.\u00a0 This is too bad, because for his own era (born in 1835, wrote mainly just after the Civil War) he actually was ahead of his time in some respects, for instance compared to his contemporary from Georgia, Joel Harris who wrote the popular\u00a0Uncle Remus<\/em> stories which were tales told by a slave.\u00a0 \u00a0In 1947, Disney even produced a movie based on the Uncle Remus stories called Song of the South.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>For sure, they would not touch that hot potato today.\u00a0 One small example of Twain\u2019s wit:\u00a0 In\u00a0The Innocents Abroad\u00a0<\/em>some world travelers went to the Sea of Galilee in the late 19th century, with Twain as a sort of host or companion. and storyteller. I would have paid good money to be on that tour.\u00a0 Anyway, they got to the Sea of Galilee and wanted to take a ride on the lake, as tourists do.\u00a0 So Twain solicited a boatman to do the job and he famously asked \u2018how much for a ride in your boat?\u2019\u00a0 The boat man said $50 dollars, to which Twain quipped, \u2018I now see why Jesus walked on this water\u2019.\u00a0 That was a whole lot of money back then in the late 1800s.<\/p>\nAnother great Southern writer of short stories that I grew up on was O Henry\u2019s stories.\u00a0 His real name was William Sydney Porter and he was born and grew up in Greensboro N.C.\u00a0 Various of his stories were made into films or short subjects, perhaps most famously \u2018The Gift of the Magi\u2019, but there are many other great ones like \u2018The Ransom of Red Chief\u2019.<\/p>\n
If one wants more contemporary writers you may actually have read I\u2019d say\u00a0Cold Mountain<\/em> by Charles Frazier which was made into an excellent film, and is a story loosely based on a N.C. Civil War soldier who abandoned the Confederate Army and made a journey home to his wife.<\/p>\nAnother is John Kennedy Toole from Louisiana (who died much too young) who wrote the spectacular A Confederacy of Dunces. <\/em>Walker Percy helped get this published, and thank goodness he did.\u00a0 He won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for this work.<\/p>\nObviously Maya Angelou should be mentioned. (from St. Louis, and late in life a professor at Wake Forest U. in Winston Salem N.C.). I would recommend \u2018I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings\u2019 and also \u2018And Still I Rise\u2019.\u00a0 She is perhaps most famous for her novels and poetry, and rightly so.<\/p>\n
Alice Walker from Georgia must also be mentioned and is most well known for The Color Purple.\u00a0<\/em>This was made into a film twice.<\/p>\nPerhaps the most famous of all Southern women writers is the author of To Kill A Mockingbird\u00a0<\/em>by Harper Lee, made into a world class film starring Gregory Peck.\u00a0 This one had more impact on the changing of Southern attitudes about race than almost any other work in my lifetime.\u00a0 One can compare and contrast it with Margaret Mitchell\u2019s classic\u2013\u00a0Gone with the Wind,\u00a0<\/em>also made into a legendary film which is not a critique of old Southern racist culture.<\/p>\nAnother Southern writer who has been amazingly prolific and popular is of course John Grisham, born in Arkansas but growing up in Mississippi. I would recommend especially his novels set in Mississippi\u2014 such as\u00a0Sycamore Row.<\/em><\/p>\nThere is so much more I could say, but I will leave it with this note.\u00a0 It is clear enough that many Southern musicians have been affected by not only Southern culture in general, but also some of this literature in particular, and here I am thinking of Bruce Hornsby and some of his most moving songs like \u2018Lost Soul\u2019 or \u2018Across the River\u2019 and of course the classic \u2018The Way It Is\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things many literary scholars have pondered is why it is that so many of the great novels and short stories that have been written since the Civil War have been written by Southern writers.\u00a0 The answer I was given at UNC is that the South is the only region of our country […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":60743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13946],"class_list":["post-60740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-the-right-sort-of-writers"],"yoast_head":"\n
Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"One of the things many literary scholars have pondered is why it is that so many of the great novels and short stories that have been written since the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the things many literary scholars have pondered is why it is that so many of the great novels and short stories that have been written since the\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Bible and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2023-11-12T06:52:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2023-11-11T12:05:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2023\/11\/download-5.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"318\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"318\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ben Witherington\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Ben Witherington\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740\",\"name\":\"Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2023-11-12T06:52:09+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2023-11-11T12:05:32+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/67da39aff728f9d015878d198839df4b\"},\"description\":\"One of the things many literary scholars have pondered is why it is that so many of the great novels and short stories that have been written since the\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/\",\"name\":\"The Bible and Culture\",\"description\":\"A One-Stop Shop for All Things Biblical and Christian\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/67da39aff728f9d015878d198839df4b\",\"name\":\"Ben Witherington\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8cf1998568f0b6ccbd63f56b44d47303?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8cf1998568f0b6ccbd63f56b44d47303?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Ben Witherington\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/author\/benw333\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know","description":"One of the things many literary scholars have pondered is why it is that so many of the great novels and short stories that have been written since the","robots":{"index":"noindex","follow":"follow"},"og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know","og_description":"One of the things many literary scholars have pondered is why it is that so many of the great novels and short stories that have been written since the","og_url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740","og_site_name":"The Bible and Culture","article_published_time":"2023-11-12T06:52:09+00:00","article_modified_time":"2023-11-11T12:05:32+00:00","og_image":[{"width":318,"height":318,"url":"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2023\/11\/download-5.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Ben Witherington","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Ben Witherington","Est. reading time":"6 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740","name":"Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#website"},"datePublished":"2023-11-12T06:52:09+00:00","dateModified":"2023-11-11T12:05:32+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/67da39aff728f9d015878d198839df4b"},"description":"One of the things many literary scholars have pondered is why it is that so many of the great novels and short stories that have been written since the","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=60740#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/","name":"The Bible and Culture","description":"A One-Stop Shop for All Things Biblical and Christian","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/67da39aff728f9d015878d198839df4b","name":"Ben Witherington","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8cf1998568f0b6ccbd63f56b44d47303?s=96&d=identicon&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8cf1998568f0b6ccbd63f56b44d47303?s=96&d=identicon&r=g","caption":"Ben Witherington"},"url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/author\/benw333\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}