Literary Works
Most notable among Bonner's publications were her local color stories in which she is said to have an "adept and skillful handling of Negro dialect", basing many of her stories around the "gran'mammy" figure she knew in her youth, Bonner's stories of Southern life were not tinged with bitterness over the victory of the North in the Civil War, rather she viewed the war as the crisis of the nation as a whole. Going so far as to disparage critics of reconstruction such as Wendell Phillips, she wrote that "The Cassandras have never saved a country yet… the critic is always and always has been overestimated as an intellectual force in his life time… The everlasting 'no' gets monotonous in the long term." Bonner favored creators over critics. Other works of note include her Dialect Tales and Suwanee River Tales. For a more thorough discussion of her works and literary merits see McAlexander's The Prodigal Daughter: A Biography of Sherwood Bonner.
Read more about this topic: Katherine Sherwood Bonner Mc Dowell
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