Tag: Southern literature

3,543 words

John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces
Foreword by Walker Percy
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980

A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the greatest comic novels ever written. It takes its name from a line of Swift’s which serves as its epigraph: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.” (more…)

1,836 words

Phil Eiger Newmann, Flannery O’Connor, 2021

Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)

2,373 words

Southern writing may be the last American literature in that it has retained a true Anglo-Saxon base in terms of its authors, themes, and relation to history — specifically, white history.

Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, published in 2015 and winning a justly-earned Pulitzer Prize for best novel, has a real command of writing, and her prose is a roller coaster dipping and rising from sad to exuberant that keeps you reading. (more…)

1,812 words

In 1962, Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine was published and immediately praised. One critic compared it to To Kill a Mockingbird, which had been published in 1960. Like Harper Lee’s book, The Moonflower Vine was the only work of its author. The novel was loved, revered, then went out of print. To Kill a Mockingbird, as we all know, is probably taught more in schools than the Bible and, to the progressive set, it is a kind of Bible.

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Phil Eiger Newmann, Flannery O’Connor, 2021.

1,842 words

Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)

Edmund Dulac, “The Buried Moon” from The Red Cross Fairy Book, 1916.

4,430 words

He had me at: “It was still the South, he knew it for a certainty when they passed an aged negro in overalls hobbling down along the highway toward no conceivable destination. The land was cursed. God, he loved it.” [1] Tito Perdue, author of the two novels here reviewed, The Smut Book and Cynosura, is a proud Southerner who has enjoyed skewering the sacred cows of these, our cursed times since he became a writer in the early 1980s. (more…)

1,779 words

Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)

William Faulkner

4,880 words

A novelist can have tremendous influence beyond his own time if he depicts major historical trends and invents characters that react in conflicting ways to these trends. If a story is vivid enough, readers might come to identify with or even emulate such characters, since the historical pressures bearing down on them bear down on the readers as well. William Faulkner accomplishes such a feat in his 1942 novel of interrelated short stories, Go Down, Moses.

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4,734 words

Shortly after the Civil War, the American South found itself in ruins. Much has been written about the devastation of the war and the indignities and strife which followed during Reconstruction. Beyond the poverty and oppression and the rapid demise of the old regime with its “outdated” culture of honor, loyalty, and heroism, the inheritors of the former Confederacy found themselves without defense in the national and international courts of moral opinion. (more…)

1,996 words

Harper Lee
Go Set a Watchman: A Novel
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015

As nearly everyone knows by now, Atticus Finch, that steadfast attorney from Maycomb, Alabama, led the local Citizens’ Council in the 1950s. When agitators from the NAACP and Communist Party came south to stir up trouble after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision, he fought the good fight for segregation. (more…)

2,446 words

One of these days Harper Lee is going to kick off and have great big posthumous laugh at our expense. Bwah-hah-hah! Because right there in her Last Notes and Testament, we will find an answer to that puzzlement that has troubled the publishing biz for a half-century or more.

Namely, why didn’t Harper Lee write any more novels after To Kill a Mockingbird?

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1,336 words

Tito Perdue
The Node
Charleston, W.V.: Nine-Banded Books, 2011

Tito Perdue’s The Node is a futuristic, dystopian satire on our anti-white system with an explicitly White Nationalist and New Rightist message.

Satire is easy – just pick a few trends and extrapolate to absurdity. Any idiot can do that, and quite a few have. Which, of course, means that good satire is very hard to do and hard to find. The Node, however, is satire of the highest order: (more…)

1,943 words

Tito Perdue
Morning Crafts
London: Arktos, 2012

At the end of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre concludes that modern civilization is bankrupt, and modern intellectual and political traditions are incapable of understanding and rectifying this decadence. He does not, however, counsel generalized pessimism, for once modernity expires of its own corruptions a new age will begin. (more…)