Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know

Last updated on: November 12, 2023 at 1:52 am by Ben Witherington

Classic Southern Literature Everyone Should Know 2023-11-11T07:05:32-05:00 Ben Witherington

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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. 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’s 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.

Let’s start with the one that won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950— William Faulkner. Of his various novels, the one I would recommend is The Sound and the Fury or if you only have time for a short story how about ‘A Rose for Emily’ or ‘Shingles for the Lord’?

He 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. What he became famous for was his plays– ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’, ‘The Glass Menagerie’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, ‘Night of the Iguana’.

I must mention my fellow UNC alum Walker Percy, and what recommend his novel Love in the Ruins. He was from Birmingham Ala. and he came to Carolina with one of my distant cousins— the famous Civil War historian Shelby Foote from Greenville Ms. 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. So, as the story goes, Porter asked Walker Percy the following: “Now Chapel Hill is appropriately named, as it is a very Christian town. Mr. Percy you don’t have any trouble believing in Jesus do you? Walker smiled and said ‘No Sir, it’s God I have trouble believing in’, to which Graham quipped, ‘Good, you’ll fit right in here in Chapel Hill’. Now, this is how Foote told the story, so it’s not clear to me how much yeast he put in that dough to make it rise.

Another writer, mainly of now famous short stories is Flannery O’Conner, from Savannah Ga. Flannery was a Catholic, and a pot stirrer to be sure on the issue of racism, the besetting sin of the South. There are too many great short stories to mention so I’d suggest starting with ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’, and if novels are more your thing I’d say read The Violent Bear It Away.

You 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’s Court . He was brilliant at satire, had a rapier sharp wit, but alas in our age of ‘wokeness’, somehow he is seen as not critical enough of slavery and racism. 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 Uncle Remus stories which were tales told by a slave. In 1947, Disney even produced a movie based on the Uncle Remus stories called Song of the South. For sure, they would not touch that hot potato today. One small example of Twain’s wit: In The Innocents Abroad 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. Anyway, they got to the Sea of Galilee and wanted to take a ride on the lake, as tourists do. So Twain solicited a boatman to do the job and he famously asked ‘how much for a ride in your boat?’ The boat man said $50 dollars, to which Twain quipped, ‘I now see why Jesus walked on this water’. That was a whole lot of money back then in the late 1800s.

Another great Southern writer of short stories that I grew up on was O Henry’s stories. His real name was William Sydney Porter and he was born and grew up in Greensboro N.C. Various of his stories were made into films or short subjects, perhaps most famously ‘The Gift of the Magi’, but there are many other great ones like ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’.

If one wants more contemporary writers you may actually have read I’d say Cold Mountain 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.

Another is John Kennedy Toole from Louisiana (who died much too young) who wrote the spectacular A Confederacy of Dunces. Walker Percy helped get this published, and thank goodness he did. He won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for this work.

Obviously 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 ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ and also ‘And Still I Rise’. She is perhaps most famous for her novels and poetry, and rightly so.

Alice Walker from Georgia must also be mentioned and is most well known for The Color Purple. This was made into a film twice.

Perhaps the most famous of all Southern women writers is the author of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, made into a world class film starring Gregory Peck. This one had more impact on the changing of Southern attitudes about race than almost any other work in my lifetime. One can compare and contrast it with Margaret Mitchell’s classic– Gone with the Wind, also made into a legendary film which is not a critique of old Southern racist culture.

Another 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— such as Sycamore Row.

There is so much more I could say, but I will leave it with this note. 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 ‘Lost Soul’ or ‘Across the River’ and of course the classic ‘The Way It Is’.

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