Greater number of authors in the American South per capita?

Cafe Society
1

See, long ago I came across a book festooned with footnotes that was essentially a screed. A very high-sounding screed, but still a screed.

I have long wondered whether certain of the claims are valid.

In a section concerning the claim that a more homogeneous milieu makes for the most fertile ground for mass-distributed creativity, the author (who may have been a “Suthnuh” hisself) listed eight Great Authors and claimed that the American South was the place to look for the highest concentration of outstanding authors.

He also used the Republic of Ireland as an example. No Irish-sounding surname.

Wondering which eight he selected as part of his evidence? I can’t recall the entire list and darned if I can find the book anywhere home after about three decades. But I do recall Carson McCullers and the unquestionably great William Faulkner.

Well?

2

Flannery O’Connor is my favorite Southern author, but would your regionalist cheerleader claim her since her main theme was what assholes Southerners could be?

3

The Wikipedia article on the Southern Renaissance, a literary movement that came to flower in the 1920s and 1930s, mentions William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Zora Neale Hurston. There is probably some overlap with your book’s list. At one time this was considered the leading literary movement in the United States. Whether the South had the highest concentration of “outstanding authors” requires a judgment call that is necessarily subjective.

4

Mark Twain’s almost certainly on the list. Maybe Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell even though they each wrote only one book. There’s also Erskine Caldwell and Truman Capote as possibilities. And Tennessee Williams is you’re counting playwrights.

5

Of the Modern Library’s “100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century,” the following qualify as Southern:
William Faulkner: **The Sound and the Fury **and **As I Lay Dying **

Carson McCullers: **The Heart is a Lonely Hunter[/B

]Robert Penn Warren: All the King’s Men

James Dickey:** Deliverance**

Walker Percy: The Moviegoer
Erskine Caldwell: Tobacco Road

William Styron:** Sophie’s Choice **(the author and the protagonist are Southern, even though much of the action is set in Brooklyn and Poland).

Beyond that, many people’s lists of the greatest SOuthern novels would include…

Kate Chopin’s The AwakeningJ

ames Agee’s** A Death in the Family**

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

Truman Capote: Other Voices, Other Rooms

John Kennnedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces

Margaret Mitchell: Gone With the WInd

Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel

Finally… very rarely are “black” novels categorized as Southern… but many of the best known annd most acclaimed novels by black authors are Southern.

THink of Alice Walker’s **The Color Purple, ** Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Toni Morrison’s **Beloved, ** Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God…

6

{emphasis added}

I’m not sure the question is that nebulous or subjective.

First: For relative population of “the South” we can take the population of what are generally considered the Southern States and divide that by the Union as a whole.

Second: Who counts as a superlative author, in or out of the subset? Presence on best seller list, minus everyone who was widely panned by the critics as a popular hack.

Finally: May have to calculate an integral over the decades.

7

I took a Southern literature course in college, which means there are enough Southern writers to at least fill a university English course.

But the instructor pointed out that while the Southern pool is deep, particularly in the 20th Century, so was the New England pool in the 19th Century. I took that to mean it runs in cycles.

8

Moved to Cafe Society.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

9

A lot of southern universities have excellent writing programs, which contributes to the perception of the South as a literary hotbed. But the definition of “the South” is pretty elastic. Is DC southern? How about Baltimore or St. Louis or Miami? These days, I would seriously look at India as the new source of big deal writers.

10

Sounds like a great subject for a writer. It worked for Mark Twain…

11

It really did; right before Southern became hip, it had been the Midwest’s turn, starting with Winesburg, Ohio, Dreiser’s Chicago, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, etc.; mostly as a result of a lot of the issues of the Progressive Era having coalesced in the Midwest. The starkness of Naturalism was well-suited to the boom-and-bust economy and the grasshopper/blizzard climate.

While the Southern Lit’s ascendancy was great, it did turn into shtick pretty soon. A lot of hacks, many not even Southerners, cranking out “Steamboat Gothics,” smutty potboilers like Hurry Sundown, and self-parody like Youngblood Hawke.

Post-WWII, the spotlight moved on to 2nd & 3rd generation Jewish writers like Phillip Roth, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, who were better-positioned for the upheaval of the 60’s.

12

Cafe Society… :smack:

13

One generation’s new direction becomes the institution the next generation rebels against.

14

I’ve lived in Alabama my whole life.

Don’t know if that substantiates or invalidates the claim.

15

Say, wasn’t there a fairly recent thread on just what parts of the geographic SE USA have the “flavor” of “the South” and which don’t?

16

The South certainly produced a lot of important authors in the late 19th through mid-20th century (well, I’m sure some since then, but that period stands out to me.) As has been said though New England was really the heavy hitter from a literary perspective in the 19th century.

I’m less interested in the factual truth of this argument (I disagree that it can be easily quantified and do believe it’s mostly subjective) as I am with the explanation for this theoretical situation. “More homogeneous milieu is the most fertile ground for mass distributed creativity”, I guess I really don’t understand how that applies to the American South.

For most of its history all of the States with the smallest percentage white populations were in the South. Even with black migration North the South still has most of the highest population black States, all of the ten states with the highest black population today aside from Delaware are Southern–although Maryland will forever be debated–and this was more true before large scale black migration North, so these States almost certainly had higher percentages of black populations in the era at question here.

In the white population, there was a good bit of variety as well. The South had some large influxes of Germans who settled down in Texas, French Huguenots in the Carolinas, Scots-Irish all throughout the Appalachias (both North and South of the Mason-Dixon.) The South had some of the larger Catholic populations outside of Italian/Irish strongholds etc. Yeah, I agree the island of Ireland was decently homogeneous in the era of its literary prominence (but I could also point out the Anglo-Irish versus Irish and etc), but the South really wasn’t.

17

You’re looking at “diverse” and “homogenous” through a broad filter. There are other ways to look at culture.

Consider the settings of the most critically acclaimed Southern novels. They’re almost always set in rural areas or small towns that are stagnant. The characters have known each other all their lives and their families have been there for generations. When blacks figure prominently in the story, they’re a part of the existing social structure (as are the crazy/damaged relatives and neighbors who often figure in the stories.)

The South may be a very broad place, but the worlds the authors wrote about were very small.

18

Okay, so then it doesn’t actually require a homogeneous culture, just small parts of said culture that are homogeneous. Which renders the original point to absurdity since even the most diverse/heterogeneous culture will have pockets of extreme homogeneity.

19

No matter how you slice it, for any given year for most of the 20th century, there were more writers, more famous writers, and more great writers living in New York City than in the rest of the country combined. It’s probably true today as well, since Brooklyn is the epicenter of hip authordom.

Whether it should be true or not, it becomes true by sheer dint of self-promotion by New York media of New York artists. No other media counts, and if writers want to be great then they should live in New York like the rest of the great world.

20

Not entirely. A “shared” culture (Let’s get away from the diversity issue) means more readers identify with the archtypes and themes the author presents.

And let’s also remember that success breeds success. So Faulkner begets Williams begets Capote and so on. That’s as true for German physicists between the wars as it is for novelists.