A Slew of Southern Writers

A Slew of Southern Writers

This article relates to Always Happy Hour

Mary Miller's Always Happy Hour is set in the south, but many will see it as something other than true southern fiction. The protagonists are too internalized, too walled off from the southerness – the land, the people, the ethos of pride, racial discord, and defeat – that is the beating heart of most great southern fiction; that is to say the forces that drive everything from regional pride to politics to art. More typical southern writers touch on some if not all of those forces, and create such a palpable sense of place that their works become universal.

Mississippian William Faulkner, a Nobel Prize winner, is one such writer. He might well have written his fiction in the blood of his ancestors. However, Faulkner was also a modernist, experimenting with different literary styles; English Professor Joseph C. Murphy described his As I Lay Dying as "a short aesthetic tour-de-force." Turn to Flannery O'Conner, her most famous work the novella A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a prime example of a writer attuned to religion, tragedy, violence, and the meaning and place of the disfigured or damaged in our world. In A Catholic Thinker, Tod Worner notes, "The work of Flannery O'Connor could be harsh, violent and discomfiting. And yet it is also thick with truth, grace and redemption." Can that truth be found only in southern literature? No, of course not, but O'Connor's work was fully informed by her Catholicism, an outlier religion in many parts of the south.

Southern literature cannot be discussed today without the unique southern experience of African-American writers. As an example, in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Celie's letters to God might push beyond the fractured boundaries of Benjy's ramblings in The Sound and the Fury, and yet there is redemption in Walker's work, and hope. Part of the Harlem Renaissance, southern-born Zora Neale Hurston wrote on social issues and penned the epic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, a complicated tale about slavery, rape, and the oppression of women. Despite her successes, she received criticism for employing dialect and for her outlier politics. Langston Hughes, a poet born in Missouri, blossomed during the Harlem Renaissance. As much as race haunts the work of writers like Faulkner, the ugliness of oppression spawned by southern slavery informs the work of modern-era authors like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and August Wilson, all of whom found places to speak and words to preach far away from sharecroppers' shacks.

While most southern literature sits squarely in its landscape, some moves outside those borders. No study of the dark heart of politics may equal Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, a dissection of Huey Long's ugly populism. There's the searing redneck tale, Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, a study of poverty's oppression of women in particular. In Cold Mountain, there's again tragedy and triumph for southern women. In poet James Dickey's Deliverance, a southern river is the stage of a Darwinian battle, symbolism rife throughout. Harry Crews turns O'Connor's milieu loose in the Georgia swamps in A Feast of Snakes. And of course, Wright and Baldwin are unafraid to dissect the consequences of the cancer of slavery on northern society after the great migration north spurred by the collapse of reconstruction and the coming of Jim Crow.

And there are countless more. The works of the great Eudora Welty, Barry Hannah, the dense and cryptic Cormac McCarthy in his novels set in Tennessee, Faulkner's The Hamlet, which reveals everything ugly about the deep south, Carson McCullers, John Kennedy O'Toole and his paean to New Orleans, Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Pat Conroy, especially The Prince of Tides.

Finally, of course, the novel many consider the epitome of southern fiction, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, with its no-blink look at racism and its hard-won foundation of moral courage, many critics suggest Lee's novel ranks with Moby Dick or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the best American novel. It is not without sharp criticisms though, as some see a sweet-tea version of the south where, yes, an attorney would defend a black man, but that black man wouldn't be invited to the attorney's home for Sunday dinner. A sense of noblesse oblige frames Mockingbird, one where the black people are not seen as equal, but as lesser people to be cared for, as people with whom a gentlemen or lady politely and generously interacts, and then referred to with the n-word in privacy or among other whites. While it's had a vastly positive influence on American society, it holds all-too-human flaws.

Some will suggest that Aways Happy Hour isn't true southern literature, at least as readers and critics have come to recognize the genre and its masters. Miller's collection, yes, draws sketches of people of the south, but not people who are rooted in places like the delta, or the piney woods, or insular towns. Neither does the demon of racial prejudice or racial hatred, rage through Miller's work. Perhaps that's a cause for optimism.

Joseph Rusling Meeker, Landscape (Bayou), 1879, courtesy of the Kemper Art Museum

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Always Happy Hour. It originally ran in January 2017 and has been updated for the January 2018 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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