Ever wonder why the American South seems to have a culture all its own? Here are some of the essential books – both fiction and nonfiction – to read to begin understanding the region and its people, written from diverse perspectives.
Intruder in the Dust (1948) by William Faulkner
1. Intruder in the Dust (1948), by William Faulkner, written at the height of the author’s powers, is a tale of injustice and vindication set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County in the early twentieth century, when the Civil War was a living memory and Jim Crow was the law of the land. Lucas Beauchamp, an aged black farmer, is tried for the murder of a white man and is cleared of all charges thanks in large part to the actions of a young white man, Charles (“Chick”) Mallison, who rises above the baser inclinations of his upbringing.
2. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), by Ernest Gaines is the fictional memoir of a long-lived African-American woman recounting her earliest memories as a slave in the Deep South, her struggles of with racist terror as an adult and her joining the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s as a centenarian. This work was adapted into a powerful four-hour television film in 1974, starring Cicely Tyson in the title role.
3. The Complete Short Stories (1971), by Flannery O’Connor is a guided tour of the life of the human spirit within what the author called “the Christ-haunted South.” Several of these short pieces are classics of the genre, including “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Enduring Chill,” “The Displaced Person,” “Greenleaf,” and “Good Country People.”
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
4. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee is a modern classic of life, adventure, the realities of racial injustice, and the meaning of love as experienced by three children in Depression-era small-town Alabama.
5. Spencer’s Mountain (1961), by Earl Hamner is a novel that captures the fierce love of a close-knit family in a Virginia village during the Great Depression, and the coming of age of the family’s oldest son. Based in large part upon the author’s life, this novel led to a popular sequel titled The Homecoming (1970), which inspired the popular 1970s television series The Waltons.
6. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941), by William Alexander Percy is an autumnal, eloquent memoir of life in the Delta region of Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow, sharecropping, the Great Flood of 1927, and the joys and sorrows of living in the postwar South. Percy provides a thoughtful, Stoic meditation on life and human relations.
7. A Long and Happy Life (1962), by Reynolds Price was the author’s first full-length work of fiction and it received much praise upon its publication – by the great Dorothy Parker, among many others. Price provides a memorable, brooding, life-affirming portrait of a young woman’s struggles with family, faith, race relations, and love in the rural Upper South.
All the King’s Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren
8. All the King’s Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren describes the rise and fall of a demagogic politician similar to Louisiana Governor Huey Long through the words of a fascinated assistant/newspaperman, who is himself transformed spiritually by his boss’s words and actions. Warren’s novel has been described rightly by Mark T. Mitchell as “a profound meditation on human nature” in which Warren “frequently recurs to Christian themes and images to bring into relief the difficulties faced by modern man in a world in which traditional beliefs seem impossible.”
9. Cross Creek (1942), by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (author of The Yearling) is a collection of essays portraying hardscrabble life among the “Crackers” of Florida’s pine-scrub country. With the breakup of her 14-year marriage, Rawlings found herself the sole master of an orange grove, responsible for fulfilling her financial responsibilities by being a steward of the land and writing saleable literary works. Cross Creek records her experiences with the land and its remarkable people.
10. A Wake for the Living: A Family Chronicle (1975), by Andrew Lytle is a ruminative memoir – by turns sobering and laugh-out-loud funny – of the author’s life and recollections of his elders in his family’s hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Lytle was one of the Agrarians who participated in the literary symposium I’ll Take My Stand, wrote several respected novels – notably The Velvet Horn (1957) – and ably edited the Sewanee Review.
- James E. Person Jr. is a longtime Gale editor and a freelance writer whose articles and reviews have appeared in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, the Raleigh News & Observer, the Washington Times, the Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (1999) and Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow (2005).
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