Living in Mississippi for the last 7 years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what makes Southern literature so great. Is it the culture of story-telling? The unique lives of families that have lived in the same place for generations? The dialect? The struggle of being a place so long ignored by the beast to the North?

Eudora Welty said this:

It is nothing new or startling that Southerners do write–probably they must write. It is the way they are:born readers and reciters, great document holders, diary keeps, letter exchangers and savers, history tracers–and, outstaying the rest, great talkers. -from Place and Time: The Southern Writer’s Inheritance

Let me be completely honest, here–that makes me jealous. The South will always only be a place I almost understand.

franklinI just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Cities on the Plain, the third book in his Border Trilogy. And it is set 20 miles from my hometown–Las Cruces, New Mexico. McCarthy made the landscape come alive with his descriptions–the creosote smell in the rain, the sun rising and setting, the Franklin and Sacramento mountains at dusk. For a little while, I got to go home again. Pure nostalgia. When John Grady asks, “Who do you think killed Colonel Fountain?” I not only know who Colonel Fountain was, but I know his great-niece, and she is still a little mad that her Great-Uncle was murdered. (If you want to know more about Albert Fountain, check this out) But it’s not familiarity that makes Southern books great, because details aren’t enough; the place has to come alive on the pages.fountain

In Mississippi, we read a lot of books. And many of those books are set in hometowns, amongst the people we know. In the South, the writer has to capture everything just how it is, because everyone is going to read your book, and if you didn’t get the details correct, you will hear about it.

So I will tip my cap to Cormac McCarthy, not that he has been waiting for my nod of approval (what with that Pulitzer Prize and everything), but to read him writing of a place I know, only underlines his skill. It makes me realize how difficult it must be to really write about the South.
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