I
grew up in the South at a time when change had arrived, and was overtaking
nearly a century of a particular way of life, a particular kind of culture. Many
people outside the South associated it with backwardness, ignorance, and
racism, and all there were certainly there. But so were major academic
scholarship and a distinct and world-recognized literature.
I
attended LSU at what was likely the zenith of its highly regarded history
department, led by T. Harry Williams, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his
biography Huey
Long (I read the fat paperback version in 1969, the year I entered
LSU). What Williams was known on campus for, however, was his class on the
history of the Civil War. It was one of the few classes that always had a
waiting list; he kept it small and it was almost always inhabited by seniors
(rank mattered in class selection).
Not
all outstanding biographies and histories were written by Southerners; A.J.
Leibling, a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1935 until his death in 1960,
published a biography of Huey Long’s brother, Earl Long, that was published in
its entirety in the New Yorker in 1960. It was called The
Earl of Louisiana.
Earl
was governor, and while he was never indicted, convicted and imprisoned like a
governor before him in the early 1940s and one after him (Edwin Edwards), he
did have one dubious distinction held by no other Louisiana governor. I was 8
when I saw on television the men in the white coats removing the governor from
the state capital, and taking him to an asylum in Texas. He did manage to talk
his way out, and he got even. One of the actions that convinced his wife
Blancher and some cronies to have him “put away” was his well publicized
national tour accompanied by Blaze Starr, a stripper in New Orleans.
Today,
politics in Louisiana seems rather tame. The state now elects governors like
Bobby Jindal. For entertainment purposes, we now have to go to the state
capital in Illinois to find something comparable to what Louisiana was in its
heyday.
In
fiction, too, the South has produced some distinctive writers. William Faulkner
is still hard to read, but he changed literature forever. Flannery O’Connor is
still widely read and admired today.
Three
Southern authors that I’ve always enjoyed reading are Walker Percy, Fred
Chappell and Donald Harington.
Walker
Percy (another native Louisianian; he grew up in the Gentilly section of New Orleans,
the setting for his novel The
Moviegoer, write a number of novels, the most memorable for me being Love
in the Ruins. It is set in a post-apocalyptic Southern city (obviously
New Orleans), and part of the story is about a sniper who gets on the roof of a
Holiday Inn and starts indiscriminately shooting people. Almost exactly the
same thing happened in downtown New Orleans in 1972 – and the hotel was a
Holiday Inn. A copy of Love in the Ruins
was found in the sniper’s apartment in Oklahoma.
Fred
Chappell, a North Carolinian, is another distinctly Southern writer. I was
introduced to his fiction in the early 1990s by a friend a work. My two favorites
are Farewell
I’m Bound to Leave You and I
Am One of You Forever.
And
then there’s Donald Harington, who lived and taught in Fayetteville, Arkansas
until his death not long ago. He’s written several novels, but his most famous
one is The
Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks. In the early 1980s, a speechwriting
colleague of mine urged everyone she met to read it. But it was out of print
and hard to find. While attending a seminar in New York, I actually discovered
a copy in a used bookstore and bought it. It is one of the most naturally funny
novels I’ve ever read.
There
are other writers, too, but these are the ones that stand out. And these are
the ones who helped me understand and make sense of my own region and history.
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