Culture of The Southern United States - Literature

Literature

Born in the Little Dixie region of Missouri to parents who had recently emigrated from Tennessee, Mark Twain is often placed within the pantheon of great Southern writers. Many of his works demonstrate his extensive knowledge of the Mississippi River and the South; also included in his works as a frequent theme were the injustice of slavery and the culture of Protestant public morality.

One of the best known southern writers of the 20th century is William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Faulkner brought new techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex techniques to American writing (such as in his novel As I Lay Dying). Faulkner was part of the Southern Renaissance movement.

The Southern Renaissance (also known as Southern Renascence) was the reinvigoration of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of writers such as Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Penn Warren, among others.

The Southern Renaissance was the first mainstream movement within Southern literature to address the criticisms of Southern cultural and intellectual life that had emerged both from within the Southern literary tradition and from outsiders, most notably the satirist H.L. Mencken. In the 1920s Mencken led the attack on the genteel tradition in American literature, ridiculing the provinicialism of American intellectual life. In his 1920 essay "The Sahara of the Bozart" (a pun on a Southern pronunciation of 'beaux-arts') he singled out the South as the most provincial and intellectually barren region of the US, claiming that since the Civil War, intellectual and cultural life there had gone into terminal decline. This created a storm of protest from within conservative circles in the South. However, many emerging Southern writers who were already highly critical of contemporary life in the South were emboldened by Mencken's essay. On the other hand, Mencken's subsequent bitter attacks on aspects of Southern culture that they valued amazed and horrified them. In response to the attacks of Mencken and his imitators, Southern writers were provoked to a reassertion of Southern uniqueness and a deeper exploration of the theme of Southern identity.

Other well-known Southern writers include Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Sidney Lanier, Cleanth Brooks, Pat Conroy, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, William Styron, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, James Dickey, Willie Morris, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Walker Percy, Charles Portis, Barry Hannah, Alice Walker, Cormac McCarthy, John Grisham, James Agee, Hunter S. Thompson, Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Harry Crews and the authors known as the Southern Agrarians.

Possibly the most famous southern novel of the 20th-century is Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, published in 1937. Another famous southern novel, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, won the Pulitzer Prize after it was published in 1960.