To truly understand the history of the American South, one needs to appreciate and be familiar with Southern literature. For Southern literature expresses the profound hopes, anguish, and aspirations of generations of Southerners during the past three-hundred years. In a real sense, Southern poets, essayists, and novelists offer a deeper insight into persons and why they acted as they did that a simple chronicling of events cannot.
Of course, for there to be a Southern literature and literary tradition there actually has to exist a real geographical region with a population and a people who self-identify historically and culturally as the part of America we call the South. That population must feel and intuitively be a part of a community, a community of largely shared beliefs and action. And that community must stretch from the old Atlantic states of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, all the way to Texas and Oklahoma and Missouri. That is, the South must be a real community, not just a geographical expression, a symbol or useful myth.
In fact, the documented migrations of colonial settlers from the South Atlantic colonies, in particular from the Carolina Piedmont, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries offer tangible confirmation. Literally thousands of folk, in community, pulled up stakes to trek south and westward, to fresh lands in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Texas, taking with them their customs, their beliefs, their religious faith, and their views on what a good society should look like. Thus, was knitted a unity that would only grow stronger during the first decades of the 19th century.
Of course, for many, the South does not have to be justified as a unique region, a region which would have taken its place as a separate and respected nation if Abraham Lincoln and his armies had not invaded and brought havoc to the land. But in today’s world many historians have attempted to do just that: to deny the South’s existence as a separate and unique region—a real country that fought for its existence during four cruel years of war against a powerful central government, and that was molded by the shared horrors of that war.
Some historians like to say that Southern traditions and heritage were shaped uniquely by slavery and the slave experience, and that Southern literature is only a derivative, or a lesser branch of American literature. But that is only part of a much larger story.
The South was already a developing and vibrant entity long before the 1861-1865 war, long before the creation and founding of the United States of America. On this point, there is substantial support from the historical record. First, there is the research of the historian Richard Beale Davis. Davis has demonstrated in his exhaustive three-volume history, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763, published by the University of Tennessee in 1970, that it was in the South where a distinctive communitarian individualism developed which distinguished it almost from the beginning from other regions of America. From the earliest landings at Jamestown and the settlements in South Carolina and Georgia, the Southern colonies developed differently from those of New England. Although by no means in conflict with its inherited British heritage, as were the Puritan settlements and traditions to the north, the South did over the years very gradually modify its rich Anglo-Celtic patrimony, adjusting to distance, circumstance, climate, the presence of Indians, and the mixture of additional folk from African and other European countries, with their customs and traditions. The result was quantifiably conservative and localist.
Professor Davis equally lays to rest the interpretation of Southern history and character that attributes everything uniquely to the presence of slavery.
This is not to deny that slavery as an issue exercised an important influence on Southern thinking, certainly in the lead up to Ft. Sumter. But slavery in the late 18th or 19th century was not seen as the critical make-or-break question that it is seen as today. Many countries, including Russia and much of Latin America, Asia and Africa had a form of it, and England had only ended it a generation or two before the War Between the States. And most American states had had the institution, only gradually manumitting slaves. In 1861, on the outbreak of war, several slave states remained in the Federal Union, and in the 1860 election Lincoln had promised not to interfere with slavery where it existed. He did not consider it a reason for his invasion of the Southern states, at least until 1863, when his Emancipation Proclamation was used as a war measure to attempt to rally Northern radicals behind his attempt to subjugate the Confederacy. Indeed, one critic of the Proclamation declares rightly, that “it attempted to free slaves where it had no authority to do so (the unconquered regions of the South), but left it completely intact in those areas of the Union where it could have freed them (such as Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky).”
In 1985 the late Mel Bradford, perhaps the most significant writer on Southern culture during the last half of the 20th century, gave a fascinating lecture at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. His commentary on Richard Beale Davis’s pioneering work and understanding of the South and its history, is titled, “Where We Were Born and Raised: The Southern Conservative Tradition.” In it there is a section which deserves to be quoted in full:
The South thought and acted in its own way before the “peculiar institution” was much developed within its boundaries. Colonial Southerners did not agonize in a fever of conscience over the injustice of the condition of those Negroes who were in bondage among them. Contrary to popular misconception, intense moral outrage at slavery was almost unheard of anywhere in the European colonies in the New World until the late eighteenth century, and was decidedly uncommon then. The South embraced slavery in its colonial nonage because Negro slavery seemed to fit the region’s needs—and because the region, through the combination of its intellectual inheritance brought over from the England of the Renaissance with the special conditions of this hemisphere, had reached certain practical conclusions.
Bradford’s essay was reprinted in full in the collection of essays, titled The Reactionary Imperative.
Even back in 1970, Professor Davis was able to apprehend the attempt of neo-abolitionist historians to attach an overriding importance to slavery in the earlier development of Southern culture and character. Davis writes that “…it is difficult to see that in the slave colonies any consistent rationale if indeed any at all developed in defense of the peculiar institution, simply because there was not a sufficiently powerful attack upon it to warrant or require a defense.” [Davis, p. 1630] The development of a natural and blood-and-soil conservatism of the South predates the furor over slavery.
One additional comment on the South as a distinctive culture, and this from perhaps the pre-eminent historian of the South in the late 20th century, Professor Eugene Genovese.
In 1985 he was interviewed extensively by Southern Partisan magazine. Based on his more than three decades of scholarly research, here is the conclusion Genovese reached (and is found in far more detail in his volume The Mind of the Master Class):
I think that those Southerners who perceived themselves by the 1850s as being in the process of forging a separate nationality and as being a people apart were right. I think this was one of the great difficulties in the way of any kind of a compromise. Northerners from their perspective had to see the country as one; Southerners had to see themselves increasingly as a separate people who were trying to negotiate a coexistence.
This is reflected, it seems to me, in the difference in Constitutional perception. For Southerners, the Union was a compact; they put it in States’ Rights terms and that meant something very real to them. I don’t underestimate it. But at the bottom of that (and I think this can be demonstrated in their own testimony) was the notion that the Constitution made possible the political co-existence of two radically different social systems. And that therefore from their point of view, the Constitution was a way to live and let live. From the Northern point of view it was much closer to being a national document. They never accepted the notion this was a solemn compact between two equal social systems.
It is clear, then, that the South, from its earliest history, developed not only as a genuinely distinct region, but because of that, its culture, its heritage, and its literature would necessarily reflect this formation.
David Hackett Fisher, in his pathbreaking study, Albion’s Seed, published in 1989, traces the transatlantic migrations of colonists from the British Isles to our shores. He argues conclusively that core aspects of American culture stem from four British regional cultures, and that their interaction and conflict have been decisive factors in U.S. political and historical development. Those settlers in the South mostly came from traditionally conservative, largely Royalist areas of southern England, or from deeply familial areas of Scotland and Ulster. Those settlers, with their customs and community-based society, would co-exist and meld with others, such as Catholics of Maryland and Louisiana, and the Germans and Scots-Irish of the Piedmont, to eventually form a distinguishable region, with a rich and distinctive history.
Now, with this foundation, Southern literature can be brought into focus, or more specifically, the Southern literary tradition. And why it is by far not only the most conservative and religiously-grounded portion of what is called erroneously “American lit,” but also is the most connected to and continuation of the great Western Christian and classical heritage, that actually began in classical Greece and Rome, then was taken over by the great saints and scholars of the Church, and passed down to the colonists who came to Southern shores. Those colonists brought with them their culture, their history, their religious faith, and their literature. And unlike the Puritans of New England and others who settled in the Northern colonies, they did not come to set up some “Shining City on the Hill,” a Utopia of the Elect, but rather they came to find new land, to raise their families, and to establish their communities much like the communities they had left in England, or Scotland, or Germany.
There are several volumes which are essential in any overview of Southern literature and the Southern literary heritage. Four works can be singled out that anyone interested in the literature of the South should consult and use as essential references.
First, there is Jay B. Hubbell’s classic survey, The South in American Literature, which although published 70 years ago—in 1954—is still perhaps the best overview of the South’s literary tradition and survey of major works produced by Southern writers.
But no examination of the origins of Southern literature and just how the South’s culture and successive history shaped it would be complete without consulting James Everett Kibler’s significant study, The Classical Origins of Southern Literature. Dr. Kibler is a South Carolinian, and his book was published by The Abbeville Institute in 2017. He demonstrates conclusively that the literary and cultural heritage of the South owes very much to what is sometimes called “the Great Tradition”—that is, the great classical heritage of ancient Rome and Greece, as taken over and Christianized by the Church, and passed on intact by colonial ancestors.
Kibler discusses in detail various Southern writers, many of whom are unknown to this generation, but who exercised an outsized influence on what became the Southern literary tradition.
One of the finest guides to Southern culture which produced its literature is by the late North Carolinian and University of Chicago professor, Richard Weaver—his very important volume, The Southern Tradition At Bay. It is one of the cornerstones in familiarizing oneself with Southern history and literature. Weaver is particularly perceptive on the Southern literary reaction to the defeat of Southern arms in 1865, and how Southern authors used that tragic defeat as a springboard for a deeper understanding of the nature of the South’s culture and what some writers have called “the tragic sense of life.” The fact is that the South and Southerners are the only portion of the American federation to have experienced the horrors and ravages of total war and defeat. And that defeat has affected not just its history, but also the literature which appeared after 1865.
A fourth volume, essential to this study, is Mel Bradford’s Generations of the Faithful Heart: On the Literature of the South. Bradford’s study is essentially a detailed examination of Southern literature and literary heritage as it developed and flowered after Appomattox. He discusses several important and very significant writers. Defeat on the battlefield and its consequences had a profound effect on the South and the moral imagination of a newer generation of authors.
There are a number of significant Southern writers who wrote in the colonial period. Dr. Kibler identifies several who need to be better known. First, he discusses Ebenezer Cooke who was born in 1665 and lived in Maryland. As Kibler points out, most scholars of the colonial period now acknowledge that Cooke was the greatest American humorist of the 18th century. His most famous book is titled The Sot-Weed Factor, published in 1708, in which he pokes good-natured fun at those who don’t understand or appreciate the rural culture of his native land.
Also in the early colonial period lived the poet John Markland from Virginia. His praise in poetry of the Southern land and community contrasts sharply with the zealous desire of the Puritans to impose their radical beliefs on everyone they came in contact with.
Perhaps the greatest and finest literary figure in the South before the American Revolution was the Virginian William Byrd the Second. Indeed, he was one of the most brilliant authors of the colonial period. He lived from 1674 until 1744. Kibler describes him as “erudite, witty, cultured, passionate, earthy and sometimes risqué.” To read Byrd is to have a perpetual smile on one’s face, maybe even occasionally to be a bit scandalized by his bawdy humor. His writings are very descriptive, and sometimes he seems to be taking friendly pot-shots at his fellow Southerners. But underneath it all is a very real love for and devotion to Virginia and the Southland.
Of all the works he wrote perhaps the most famous is History of the Dividing Line Run in the Year 1728. It’s a marvelous work that used to be read in literature classes years ago, but now has been subject to cancel culture. Byrd was charged by the royal governor of Virginia to survey the boundary line between the Old Dominion State and North Carolina, and he left a delightful account of his travels.
To offer an idea of Byrd’s style and humor here is his description of the North Carolina backwoods farmers he encountered. It’s genuinely funny:
Surely there is no place in the World where the Inhabitants live with less Labour than in North Carolina. It approaches nearer to the Description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity of the Climate, the easiness of raising Provisions, and the Slothfulness of the People…. The men, for their parts, just like the Indians, impose all the work upon the poor women. They make their wives rise out of their beds early in the morning, at the same time that they lie and snore, till the sun has risen one third of his course, and dispersed all the unwholesome damps. Then, after stretching and yawning for half an hour, they light their pipes, and, under the protection of a cloud of smoke, venture out into the open air; though, if it happens to be never so little cold, they quickly return shivering into the chimney corner. When the weather is mild, they stand leaning with both their arms upon the corn-field fence, and gravely consider whether they had best go and take a small heat at the hoe: but generally find reasons to put it off till another time. Thus they loiter away their lives, with their arms crossed, and at the winding up of the year scarcely have bread to eat. To speak the truth, it is a thorough aversion to labor that makes people file off to North Carolina, where plenty and a warm sun confirm them in their disposition to laziness for their whole lives.
As is evident, Byrd was a colorful wordsmith, and his descriptions are not only humorous but they also demonstrate why he was America’s first great story-teller.
Moving into the 19th century, President Thomas Jefferson must be mentioned. He was an excellent essayist, and some of his works qualify as great literature, as well. Then, there is John Taylor of Caroline, another great Virginian, who not only excelled at writing, but authored several treatises on political issues, including the traditional states’ rights interpretation of the US Constitution. Perhaps his most famous work is Arator, published in 1813. It is a great literary work but also a profound defense of agrarian society and what would be called strict constructionism. Jefferson considered Taylor the most outstanding defender of “the original and true principles of the Constitution…which has appeared since the adoption of the instrument.” Later Southern thinkers, notably John C. Calhoun, were clearly indebted to Taylor.
Many literature surveys declare that James Fennimore Cooper was the first great American novelist. But Cooper must share that distinction with Johnson Jones Hooper, who was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, and then moved to Alabama in 1835, where he began publishing short stories about his rascally character Simon Suggs. He collected those humorous stories in the volume Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers. The main character, Simon Suggs, has the motto, “it is good to be shifty in a new country,” which fully exemplifies a backwoods version of the national archetype now known as the confidence man, the grafter, and the professional flim-flam artist. Hooper’s sketches and parodies were so influential that they inspired Mark Twain.
Other pre-War Between the States writers demand attention. First, there is John Pendleton Kennedy. A Marylander, in addition to serving as Secretary of the Navy under President Millard Fillmore, Kennedy wrote several significant historical plantation novels, including Swallow Barn in 1832 and Horse-Shoe Robinson: A Tale of the Tory Ascendancy in South Carolina in 1780, which was published in 1835. Washington Irving was so delighted with Horse-Shoe Robinson that he read it out loud to his friends.
Kennedy was a friend and associate of the great Edgar Allen Poe and assisted him in his career. Of course, Edgar Allan Poe needs no introduction; he is probably the most famous Southern writer prior to the war, even though he was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe is widely known for his poetry and short stories, and his work with the Southern Literary Messenger magazine. Poe died in 1848 of tuberculosis, but the Messenger continued publication right up into the War Between the States period, publishing a strong defense of secession in February 1861.
Of course, some of Poe’s works continue to be familiar—his poetry, his Gothic horror stories, his satire. Thousands of books and articles have been written about them and about him. He was certainly one of the greatest writers produced by America in the 19th century…and many a frantic student has had to memorize some of his poetry—maybe “The Raven” or “Annabel Lee.” Or maybe read one of his short stories, like “The Black Cat,” or “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
Advancing to mid-century, the South is already a distinct region, vividly aware of the differences between its largely-agriculture-based life and the fanatical descendants of the Puritans, the abolitionists, and the financial and industrial oligarchy of the North. It is the poet and novelist William Gilmore Simms who towers above others. Edgar Allan Poe praised his novels and, in particular, his historical work, The Yemassee, published in 1835, about the Yemassee Indian war in South Carolina in the early 1700s, and The Partisan, on the Revolutionary War. The Partisan was one of the most popular novels ever published in the South.
Simms was also a great poet, and like his younger associate Henry Timrod and several others, he understood fully the mounting hostility and hatred of the North towards the South. In 1850 Simms published his satirical work, “The Father Abolitionist.” It begins by having Satan flee out of Hell because it is so overrun with bossy Puritans that they’ve taken over Hell and made it unbearable! And in his volume of Collected Poems Simms takes sharp aim at Yankees and their desires to control and dominate the South country. In his poem, “My Man Tom,” he declares:
Tom, none of your Yankee pomps for me;
Weave me no wreaths from the maple tree;
Nor trouble yourself to please my mood,
To seek where the Quaker roses brood.
The Myrtle alone, good Tom, be mine.
With a cheering bowl ‘neath the Southern vine.
For Simms and his associates, the War for Southern Independence and subsequent defeat and Reconstruction help meld the South through fire and the sword, emphasizing for every thinking Southerner the importance of memory and of the heritage received from his ancestors. It is the War that acts as a crucible for Southern literature and crystalizes the consciousness of Southerners—that they are indeed a separate people from their neighbors north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Great Southern writers like Timrod and Simms understood this and their writings illustrate the real emergence of a new Southern nation which was created in 1861.
Foreseeing the break-up of the American confederation as early as 1842, Simms wrote the essay, “Agriculture Labor,” which defended the rural South and heralded future Southern independence. Here is a stirring passage from it:
If you love your country—if you look upon her maternal plains as the patriot should look—with the yearning love of a son for the mother who has borne him— then you will not desert her in her age and feebleness. You will cling to her to the last. You will repair her broken fortunes—you will enrich her decaying fields—you will give her the whole strength of your manhood—you will make your grave in her bosom!
This total devotion to and love for the Southland is perhaps even more manifested in the work of Henry Timrod, the man who is rightly called “The poet laureate of the Confederacy.”
Young Timrod attended the meeting of the First Congress of the new Confederate States of America, in Montgomery in February 1861, where he composed and read aloud his epic poem, “Ethnogenesis,” which is literally translated as the “birth of a new people—the birth of a new nation.” Here are the first few lines of that work pronounced at the beginning of the new Confederacy:
Hath not the morning dawned with added light?
And shall not evening call another star
Out of the infinite regions of the night,
To mark this day in Heaven? At last, we are
A nation among nations; and the world
Shall soon behold in many a distant port
Another flag unfurled!
Now, come what may, whose favor need we court?
And, under God, whose thunder need we fear?
Thank Him who placed us here….
But Timrod is most well-and-justly known by his grand lament for the Confederacy, his “Ode to the Confederate Dead, Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston in 1867.” It’s not long, and it does good to quote it once more:
Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause; Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause. In seeds of laurel in the earth The blossom of your fame is blown, And somewhere, waiting for its birth, The shaft is in the stone! Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years Which keep in trust your storied tombs, Behold! your sisters bring their tears, And these memorial blooms. Small tributes! but your shades will smile More proudly on these wreaths to-day, Than when some cannon-moulded pile Shall overlook this bay. Stoop, angels, hither from the skies! There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned!
Timrod evoked the deepest feelings of Southerners after the heartbreaking defeat in 1865. And his Ode still does that today.
Of course, both Simms and Timrod have been cancelled by the dominant “woke” academia in the present day, condemned as defenders of slavery. Nevertheless, the classical elegance and beauty and deeply felt emotion of their works remain to give pleasure and continue to inspire.
During Reconstruction and the last portion of the 19th century much of Southern literature was a kind of panegyric, a memorialization of Southern heroism during the War and a lament for the honored dead. But even more, Southern writers, in particular, Southern novelists in their works of fiction, defended their homeland and its righteous cause.
Five authors stand out during the period and continued their careers well into the 20th century. The men are John Esten Cooke, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Dixon, and the female author is Augusta Jane Evans. Each of these writers in his own particular manner romantically idealized the Old South.
Each of them through their writings sought to remind their fellow Southerners of the valor of their soldiers and, in many ways, the rightness of their cause.
One of the most successful was Thomas Nelson Page, whose series of short stories, collected in the volume, In Ole Virginia, published in 1887, featured the tales of “Marse Chan.” Later Page published the story, “Burial of the Guns.” In it he describes the refusal of a Confederate artillery regiment to surrender their guns. Rather, they roll them over a cliff into a river. Here he informs the reader what is happening:
We’re all volunteers, every man; we joined the army at the beginning of the war; and we’ve stuck through to the end; sometimes we ain’t had much to eat and sometimes we ain’t had nothin’; but we fought the best we could 119 battles and skirmishes as near as we can make out in four years, and never lost a gun. Now we are agoin’ home. We ain’t surrendered just disbanded; and we pledge ourselves to teach our children to love the South and General Lee; and to come when we are called anywhere and anytime, so help us God.
These sentiments find an echo in Thomas Dixon, the author of several historical novels about Reconstruction, including the very popular The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, and his historical novel, The Clansman, provided the basis for the first great American epic film, The Birth of A Nation, which President Woodrow Wilson had privately screened in the White House in 1915.
The Birth of a Nation, of course, remains highly controversial today, but it cannot be denied that this epic, directed by the pioneer of American cinema, D. W. Griffith, is a watershed event in American and world filmmaking. Griffith, by the way, was the son of a Confederate veteran, as was Will Rogers, the most famous humorist of his day.
Georgia writer Augusta Jane Evans, although not that well known today, was a widely read and lauded novelist whose post-War work, St Elmo (1866), sold more than a million copies within four months of its publication—easily topping potboiler Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But in today’s politically-correct environment one hears almost nothing about Evans, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work continues to receive paeans of praise.
Then, there is Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus stories delighted generations of children, and which formed the basis of one of the greatest films of all time, certainly Disney’s greatest hit, Song of the South, which was released in 1946. Sadly, due to the evil spirit of times, Song of the South has had no commercial release on DVD in the United States. Disney, after Walt Disney’s death, went totally and insanely “woke.” Yet, there are copies that may be had if one searches hard enough.
The period of American history from World War I until the late 1960s was a time of reunion between North and South. Hollywood filmmakers produced a great number of fair, if not frankly pro-Southern movies, many based on Southern literature…and not just Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, the film version of which remains among the most viewed films of all time, but once popular films such as the 1935 movie, So Red the Rose, based on a War novel by Stark Young.
Young was part of perhaps the greatest American literary movement of the 20th century, the Southern Agrarians. Centered at Vanderbilt University, these twelve literary giants included poets, novelists, playwrights, historians, and essayists from several Southern states. Even today poets Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom continue to stand as two of the finest poets, not just of the South but of the American nation. Robert Penn Warren authored All the King’s Men, a novel that served as the basis for one of the country’s finest films. The historian Frank Owsley produced in 1949 a pathbreaking study, Plain Folk of the Old South, which examines the role of yeoman farmers in Southern history.
Of all the Southern Agrarians the one who may speak most meaningfully and eloquently to Southerners is Donald Davidson. It was Davidson who essentially gathered the group of twelve together to produce and publish in 1930 the Southern manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. In it those twelve literary masters elaborated a brilliant re-statement of the South’s cultural heritage, its greatness, and detailed significant differences between the vision of the Southland and that of its cousins in the North. Forthrightly anti-big business and anti-corporatist, the authors of I’ll Take My Stand celebrate and defend not only the conservative agrarian inheritance of the South, but also fully understand the importance of being rooted in a place, in a family, in a community of like-minded folks, and, above all, obedient to and worshipping a merciful God.
Davidson, himself, is one of the South’s greatest poets. In addition to a number of non-fiction works, he authored one of the finest poems ever written by a Southerner, a poem that expresses the faith of Southerners, even after the defeat of 1865 and the torturous history since then.
That epic poem is titled, “Lee in the Mountains.” The last portion, which is a clarion call to Southern folk of every age, needs to be read out loud. The narrator calls upon all generations of Southerners to be faithful to their God-given traditions and heritage, and never to abandon them, because God will not forsake them. Here is that last reminder and call to renewed faith:
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children’s children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.
The great Southern writers, novelists, poets, and essayists of the past seventy-five years are far too numerous to discuss in detail. We should mention in passing the fine novelist Caroline Gordon whose novel of the war, None Shall Look Back, merits reading. Then there is the great Georgian, Flannery O’Connor, whose novel, Wise Blood, was made into a successful film. But it is her two volumes of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, that remain her enduring legacy. Deeply religious and from a staunchly Southern Catholic family, O’Connor examines original sin and evil in the world, sometimes with a profound sense of satire and wry humor.
Often O’Connor writes ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern personalities who undergo transformations of character that frequently are accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of holiness. However grotesque the setting, she tries to portray her characters as open to the touch of Divine Grace. It was O’Connor who once wrote that the South was “Christ-haunted,” and wondered if it would exist without God’s grace.
Like O’Connor, novelist and non-fiction writer Walker Percy, Alabama-born but longtime resident of Covington, Louisiana, grappled with the inescapable human need for religion, the element of faith, in the lives of his characters. His protagonists face the isolation and loneliness of modern life, and always the search for something that would satisfy them beyond the material. Of his novels The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, and The Second Coming stand out as expressing the challenges of modern life which seem to only end in despair.
The cousin of William Alexander Percy, whose memoir Lanterns on the Levee is one of the finest memoirs of plantation life in Mississippi, Walker Percy was trained in the sciences and medicine at prestigious universities. But soon he became aware that there must be more to life than the answers that science offered. In 1947 he converted from agnosticism to the Catholic Church.
In a famous interview in the December 1977 issue of Esquire magazine, he explained his own personal spiritual journey:
This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and to have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and wouldn’t let go until God identified himself and blessed him.
Perhaps the greatest American novelist of the 20th century was the Mississippian William Faulkner. Faulkner spent his boyhood listening to stories told to him by his elders about the War, about slavery, about Reconstruction, and about his family. Young William was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his portrayal of Southern characters, and his timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people who are dwelling behind the façades of good ole’ boys and country bumpkins.
Faulkner’s prodigious output includes celebrated novels such as The Sound and the Fury in 1929, Light in August in 1932, and Absalom, Absalom in 1936. Several of his novels were turned into films.
Faulkner’s work is deeply influenced by and immersed in his life as a Southerner. His works have been examined by many critics from a wide variety of critical perspectives, including his position on slavery in the South and his view that desegregation was not to be forced on people, arguing that desegregation should “go slow” so as not to upend the southern way of life. Although not considered a hard-core conservative during his lifetime, in contemporary society his views and writing put him at odds with the dominant progressivism which runs rampant among our so-called “intellectual class.”
There are numerous passages and portions from Faulkner which could be quoted. But one, in particular, from his novel Intruder in the Dust, published in 1948, stands out for its profound understanding of the moral imagination as a real part of Southern character. Through entering the past and seeing with the eyes of earlier generations Southerners can discover the importance of memory and the rich inheritance which is theirs.
The passage goes like this:
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble….
This moving passage illustrates the vital significance of hope and resilience for Southerners. That vision must recall the history of the past and the importance of memory, for a people who have forgotten or discarded their past have no future. Southern poets, novelists, and writers speak to those who would listen. Southern literature not only serves to remind the present generation of the exploits of their ancestors, their defeats and their hardships, but also their hopes and dreams which are never really dead.
Robert Lee Frost was not a Southerner, but a Vermonter. Yet he was raised in a strongly pro-Confederate, pro-Southern family. In one of his poems, “The Black Cottage,” he writes these words which memorably express that background:
For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back to.
Through hardship and persecution Southerners have a magnificent literary inheritance which can give their descendants strength and inspire hope…if they embrace it and use it with God’s help to vanquish the forces of arrayed against them.
Featured: Captain John Purves and His Wife, Eliza Anne Pritchard, by Henry Benbridge; painted in 1775.
