Ask for great Southern ones and you’ll more than likely get a name from the Southern Renaissance: William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe—all of them sandwiched into the same couple of post-Agrarian decades…It is impossible to imagine these writers divorced from the South. This is unusual, and a product of the unusual circumstances that gave rise to them. Faulkner, Lee, Percy, and Welty were no more Southern than Edgar Allen Poe or Sidney Lanier or Kate Chopin, and yet their writing, in the context of the South at that time, definitively was. There’s a universal appeal to their work, to be certain, but it’s also very much a regional literature, one grappling with a very specific set of circumstances in a fixed time...Even coming from the South I've never particularly cared for Southern lit:
Everyone in those Southern stories was always shuffling down a dirty, dusty road, the sun blazing while they looked for a place to get a new collar. And they were always ordering pies. Fruit pie, slice of pie, a pie and a glass of beer please. It always seemed to be summer and blazing hot.I've always much preferred British lit, in fact:
But in British Lit, the streetlights were always slowly coming on as the snow starting to pick up speed, and everybody raced home to witness the goose being pulled from the fire, brandy flowing and cranberry stuffing in huge white bowls. Off in the distance, carolers.Of course I also never felt a real connection to the South anyways.
And oh yeah I hated The Ponder Heart.
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