Southern Classics
Southern literature is defined as literature about the Southern United States or by writers from this region. Characteristics of southern literature include a focus on a common southern history, the significance of family, a sense of community and one’s role within it, the community's dominating religion and the burden religion often brings, issues of racial tension, land and the promise it brings, a sense of social class, and the use of southern dialect.
A Death in the Family by James Agee – this novel is good realistic fiction, documenting the circumstances of Jay Follet’s death in brilliant detail. Its language is so striking and its feeling so deep that some critics have called it as much a poem or meditation as a novel. Generally considered one of the best-written works of modern American literature, this novel begins on the eve of Jay Follet’s death and ends with his funeral. Within this concentrated story, however, several interwoven sections take the reader into the memories of young Rufus, Jay’s son, and thus into a wider expanse of time.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin – First published in 1899, a seminal novel by one of America's first feminist writers features a businessman's wife who, while spending the summer in a seaside resort away from her husband, begins to yearn for freedom and personal fulfillment.
Deliverance by James Dickey – Four suburban businessmen take a canoe trip along a Georgia river, an odyssey that pits their courage against the river's raging rapids and the most primitive human impulses of fear, lust and murder.
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner – This is William Faulkner’s first masterpiece. What separates The Sound and the Fury from his three earlier novels is its technique: his first novels are, generally, narrated chronologically by an omniscient narrator. However in this work, each of its four chapters is told by a different narrator; Faulkner is the first American writer to employ such complex narrative strategies. Told chronologically, The Sound and the Fury is the saga of a Southern family in decline. Faulkner’s portrait of the once-prominent Compson clan shows two dysfunctional parents, a suicidal son, a fallen daughter, a retarded son, and a son racked with bitterness. For Faulkner, the Compsons represent the collapse of the old Southern order in the decades following the Civil War.
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines – In the year 1948, in rural southern Louisiana, Jefferson, a barely literate black man of twenty-one, has been sentenced to death because he had the misfortune to be a bystander at a shooting that resulted in the death of a white man. The action of the novel covers the period between sentencing and execution. That the sentence will be carried out is never in serious doubt. The question the novel explores is the terms on which Jefferson will confront his own death.
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus – Lucille Marsden, 99, recalls her husband (whom she married when she was 15 and he was over 45) and his experiences in the Civil War and afterward during Reconstruction.
The Collected Stories of O. Henry – Classic tales of con men, tricksters and 'innocent' deceivers; fate, luck and coincidence.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston – Meet the unforgettable Janie Crawford, an articulate African-American woman in the 1930s. Traces Janie's quest for identity, through three marriages, on a journey to her roots.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – Scout's father defends a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town during the 1930s.
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy – Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1950s, this novel tells the story of a man who has repudiated his well-to-do parents, deserted his wife and is now a river fisherman who consorts with robbers, ragmen and other outcasts.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers – A quiet, sensitive girl searches for beauty in a small, but damned, Southern town.
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell – Scarlett O'Hara faces and survives the Civil War and Reconstruction and marries Rhett Butler for his money because her true love has married someone else.
The Collected Stories of Flannery O'Connor – Tales depicting the humorous, if near tragic, conditions of life in the Deep South during the fifties.
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy – Contemporary New Orleans is the setting for a novel in which Jack Bolling and his cousin Kate Cutrer each attempt to find a sense of reality in what is to them the unreal world of the present. Bolling, a bachelor of 30, finds only temporary solace in incessant movie-going and a succession of attractive secretaries, while Kate, suffering from the effects of a nervous breakdown, seeks an alternative to suicide. Their marriage and a semi-hopeful glimpse into their life together end a finely etched, sensitive commentary on the rootlessness and fragmentation of contemporary life.
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter – Porter is distinguished by her small literary production of exquisitely composed and highly praised short fiction. Although she lived to be 90 years old, she produced and published only some 25 short stories and one long novel. Nevertheless, her work was praised early and often from the start of her career; some of her stories have been hailed as masterpieces. She has been called "a maker of darkish parables" for her treatment of individuals who are impoverished by the modern environment and also for her use of the themes of guilt, isolation, and spiritual denial.
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins – Champion hitchhiker Sissy Hankshaw, braless and free, makes her way across the confused and paranoid America of the 1970s, gathering knowledge and experience, friends and suitors, and all sorts of unusual acquaintances.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom's master sells him, separating him from his wife, and he becomes attached to the gentle daughter of his new owner, but after her death, he is sold to the evil Simon Legree.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole – A fat New Orleans misanthrope who constantly rebukes society, Ignatius Reilly, gets a job at his mother's urging but ends up leading a worker's revolt.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – Arguably the most influential Southern novel of the 19th century. Ernest Hemingway said of the novel, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." Huck tells the story in his own words – a radical narrative technique at that time – and the gulf between what he sees and what he understands produces a richly ironic indictment of slavery in all of its forms.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker – Two African-American sisters, one a missionary in Africa and the other a child-wife living in the South, support each other through their correspondence, beginning in the 1920s.
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren – The rise and fall of Willie Stark, a southern political boss, graphically told by his right-hand man, Jack Burden, an idealist and a cynic. Willie rises from a decoy candidate, who sincerely wants to help the people of the state, to a successful governor who admits that a little graft is necessary to make the wheels go round and that every man has his price, until he is shot down by the outraged brother of his mistress.
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty – Welty's faultless ear for comic dialogue also registers exquisitely lyrical and nuanced language, language acclaimed upon her death as "glimmering and fragile, but also deep and coarse as a sea net." Rather than being plot-driven, Welty's stories often evoke "A Still Moment" - to borrow one of her titles - by using the cadence and timbre of words to evoke emotion, as much as she employs the emotions of her characters themselves to do so. Along with her comic voice, Welty's mastery of the poetic sensibility within the short story genre represents her great achievement as a writer.
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams – Two streetcars, one named Desire, the other Cemeteries, brought Blanche DuBois on a spring afternoon to the Elysian Fields address of her sister Stella, whom she had not seen since Stella’s marriage to Stanley Kowalski. With this play, Williams shows the reality of people’s lives, an enduring concern of his throughout his writing career. He wrote this believing he was about to die, so he wrote about what he felt needed to be said. When it was first presented, the play was considered shocking because of its frank presentation of sexual issues.