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The South and Southern History

by Clyde Wilson

PART 6

Modern Southern Literature

Southern literature in the 20th century is the marvel of the world and probably the most lasting cultural acheivement of the U.S. Literature begins with language and that subject begins with The Language of the American South* by the great literary scholar and critic Cleanth Brooks. Southern speech has always attracted attention and Brooks knows where it comes from. A few years ago there was a PBS television series on the English language put together by a humorless, pseudo-intellectual Canadian. It was wrong about nearly everything. According to this production, there is no such thing as a Southern accent since it was never mentioned. There was a variety of English from the South which originated with one particular isolated black group.

Then there was a general American accent. The segment about this included people who kept insisting they spoke Southern, which they obviously did, though according to the series such a form of English does not exist! Apparently U.S. Grant and Bedford Forrest talked just alike, as do Bob Dole and Strom Thurmond. Brooks knows the origin and significance of Southern speech and he is backed up by the specialized works of the late Prof. Raven McDavid of the University of Chicago. McDavid was the premier authority on American speech and a native of South Carolina.

Works on Southern Literature:

Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature

Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country

M.E. Bradford, Generations of the Faithful Heart and Against the Barbarians

Mark R. Winchell, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism and Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance

Donald Davidson, Southern Writers in the Modern World

Political and Social Commentary:

J. Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks at Lincoln

Works of Ronald and Donald Kennedy previously cited

Thomas Fleming, The Politics of Human Nature

Gordon Thornton, The Southern Nation: The New Rise of the Old South

Oran P. Smith, ed., So Good a Cause

Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition

Ted J. Smith, ed., Steps Toward Restoration

Joseph Scotchie, The Vision of Richard Weaver

Memoirs:

Ben Robertson, Red Hills and Cotton (upcountry South Carolina)

Marjorie Kennan Rawlings, Cross Creek (northern Florida; avoid the horrible movie version.)

John Graves, Hard Scrabble and Goodbye to a River (East Texas)

Zora Neal Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (African-American)

Essays: Literary and Social Commentary:

William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters

Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War

Andrew Lytle, From Eden to Babylon

John Donald Wade, Selected Essays*

Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades

Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners

Works of M.E. Bradford and Richard Weaver already cited

George Garrett, My Silk Purse and Yours and Sorrows of Fat City

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

Wendell Berry, What Are People For? and other works

Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye and The Florence King Reader

Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up

H.W. Crocker III, Robert E. Lee on Leadership

Fiction and Poetry:

Here we enter the realm of taste. Not being a literary critic, my taste runs to creative literature that conveys with verity the life of the South, and not that which may be judged by the world as the greatest. I have already mentioned many of the best, by my rule, in appropriate sections above. Undoubtedly, there is a vast collection of good Southern writers and books to choose from, and they are still coming. Other books by the writers suggested below and books by other writers are just as good.

Flannery O'Connor, Collected Stories (Georgia)

Fred Chappell, I am One of You Forever, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You, Look Back All the Green Valley, and Midquest (western North Carolina)

Wendell Berry, Memory of Old Jack and Jayber Crow (Kentucky)

Tito Perdue, Lee, The New Austerities and Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture

George Garrett, The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You (modern Florida). Garrett's Elizabethan novels, Death of the Fox and The Succession are not strictly about the South, but they are masterpieces set in the English world out of which the first Southerners came.

Walker Percy, The Second Coming, Love in the Ruins, and others (Louisiana)

Donald Davidson, Big Ballad Jamboree (country music)

James E. Kibler, Poems from Scorched Earth (South Carolina)

James Lee Burke, in a whole series of novels about Detective Robicheaux in the Louisiana Cajun country has raised crime fiction to the level of serious literature for the first time since Poe. Burke is also the author of a fine Southern "Western," Two For Texas.

Cormac McCarthy, a Southern writer, has produced a classic "Western" trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, Cities of the Plain, and The Crossing.

Other Southern novels set in "the West": Charles Portis, True Grit (Arkansas and Oklahoma) and Alan LeMay, The Searchers (Texas), both of which became John Wayne vehicles.

Then there is the saga of the Alabama writer Forrest Carter, friend and supporter of Governor George Wallace, who wrote the book Gone to Texas upon which Clint Eastwood's "The Outlaw Josey Wales" was based. Carter also wrote The Education of Little Tree, about the sufferings of an Indian boy at the hands of puritanical authorities. The book was reprinted by the devotedly multicultural University of New Mexico Press and became celebrated in Native American studies. Any reader other than an American intellectual could see right away that the book is really about the persecution of Southerners by Yankees. Imagine the consternation when Carter's background was revealed! (The movie version became anti-Southern, of course.)

The history of the Southwest (and to some extent the Northwest) is the history of extending the South into new territory. Without Southerners, the West is just a boring account of sodbusters, railroads, and cavalry. But that is a story for another time. Meanwhile, if you wish, you have a lifetime of satisfying learning before you.

July 9, 2001

Dr. Wilson is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.