FIFTY SOUTHERN WRITERS AFTER 1900. A BIO- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOURCEBOOK EDITED BY JOSEPH M. FLORA AND ROBERT BAIN GP GREENWOOD PRESS NEW YORK WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT LONDON ISBN 0-313-24519-3 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper) Copyright © 1987 by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain FIFTY SOUTHERN WRITERS AFTER 1900. A BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOURCEBOOK ....1 Introduction ...............................................................................................................................................1 Erskine Caldwell (1903- ) .........................................................................................................................5 Truman Capote (1924-1984) ...................................................................................................................12 Ralph Ellison (1914- ) .............................................................................................................................19 William Faulkner (1897-1962) ...............................................................................................................25 Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) ....................................................................................................................35 Carson McCullers (1917-1967) ..............................................................................................................40 Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) ..............................................................................................................46 Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) .............................................................................................................52 Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) .......................................................................................................58 William Sydney Porter [O. Henry] (1862-1910) ....................................................................................64 John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) ..........................................................................................................72 William Styron (1925- ............................................................................................................................77 Allen Tate (1899-1979) ...........................................................................................................................84 Robert Penn Warren (1905- ) ..................................................................................................................91 Eudora Welty (1909- ) ............................................................................................................................97 Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams (1911-1983) .............................................................................102 Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) ..................................................................................................................107 Richard Wright (1908-1960) .................................................................................................................113 Introduction "Far from slipping quietly into the American mainstream--whatever that may be--a new generation of Southern novelists and short-story writers seems to be staging what amounts to yet another literary uprising, a far better word than 'renaissance,' with its intimations of mugged-up classicism." So said Gene Lyons in "The South Rises Again," a lively essay in Newsweek of 30 September 1985. And so said Donald R. Noble in the final chapter of The History of Southern Literature, published by Louisiana State University Press in 1985. In the chapter entitled "The Future of Southern Writing," Noble wrote, "Yet, for every sign of homogenization there is equal evidence that Southern life retains traditions and values, attitudes and accents that will be a very long time in the erasing. For the foreseeable future, there is a South, therefore a Southern literature." Fifty Southern Writers After 1900 is about these uprisings and continuities. Though Renascence might sound to Lyons even more mugged up than renaissance, Fifty Southern Writers After 1900, a companion volume to Fifty Southern Writers Before 1900, uses that word to describe Southerners' remarkable literary achievements during William Faulkner's generation. These Renascence writers, publishing between 1919 or thereabouts and mid-century, include such diverse talents as Thomas Wolfe, Richard Wright, Ellen Glasgow, Jean Toomer, James Branch Cabell, Allen Tate, Zora Neale Hurston, John Crowe Ransom, and Eudora Welty. Now a new generation of Southerners, publishing within the last three decades, has created an uprising full of wit, outrageousness, pity, violence, compassion, love, honor, courage, and human perversity. Like the Renascence writers before them, authors of this new generation tap Southern regional peculiarities and experience to create art that talks of the griefs that grieve upon universal bones. Besides recounting the lives and achievements of the Renascence authors, FiftySouthern Writers After 1900 -1 1 Southern Writers After 1900 documents some rumblings from this new generation with essays about Harry Crews, Doris Betts, and others. Fifty Southern Writers After 1900 offers students and teachers an overview of the writers' lives and work. Each essay, written by a knowledgeable scholar, contains five parts: a biographical sketch, a discussion of the author's major themes, an assessment of the scholarship, a chronological list of the author's works, and a bibliography of selected criticism. Readers working their way through this volume and its companion will have, we hope, a valuable complement to The History of Southern Literature, which emphasizes chronology and movements. For several reasons, we have fixed the dividing line between our two volumes at 1900 rather than the Civil War. First, to give as much coverage as our format of 100 authors would permit, we decided to concentrate in our second volume on those twentieth-century writers important in the literary uprising known as the Renascence. Such a volume would have to include essays about Erskine Caldwell, Paul Green, Shelby Foote, Hamilton Basso, and Caroline Gordon, as well as those authors more often anthologized in collections of Southern and American writing. And because much Southern writing before the turn of the century is significant for cultural and historical reasons rather than artistic achievements, we chose 1900 as our dividing line in order to make our portrait of the period and its artists as comprehensive as we could. Another reason for setting 1900 as the dividing line between the two volumes seems even more compelling. Though the Civil War and Reconstruction were the cataclysmic events in Southern history, it took a generation's distance before Southerners began to transmute this experience into enduring art. With the exceptions of Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, Charles W. Chesnutt, and a few others, most Southerners writing between 1865 and 1900 defended proudly and fiercely their father's choices and lamented the consequences of the Lost Cause. Though these Southerners produced little enduring art, they created a powerful mythology that still captures the imagination. In this myth, moonlight and magnolias surround dashing gentlemen and beautiful ladies attended by faithful slaves who treasure their servitude. Often set in the South before the war, these tales recount the tragic consequences of the Lost Cause. Thomas Nelson Page's "Marse Chan" ( 1884) draws the archetypal outlines of this Southern myth. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind ( 1936), probably the most popular American novel in the twentieth century, presents this myth powerfully and imaginatively, but Mitchell also transforms it by celebrating the bourgeois values of the antebellum South and by adopting Freudian insights to comment on the Southern social order. Other Renascence writers questioned even more mercilessly than Mitchell their inherited Southern mythology. In their quest for truth rather than justification, they created new and more powerful mythologies that set aside the evasions and sentimentality of the old myth for a clear-eyed, humane look at the comedies, tragedies, and grotesqueries of their Southern heritage. Firing one -2 of the uprising's first shots, H. L. Mencken in "The Sahara of the Bozart" ( 1917) castigated Virginia for being "senile" and Georgia for being "crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious." In between, said Mencken, "lies a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence." But the iconoclastic Mencken was only partly right. In such novels as The Deliverance ( 1904) and Virginia ( 1913), Ellen Glasgow had already begun writing Virginia's social history; she had questioned Southern stereotypes about the social order and about the roles of men and women in that order. James Weldon Johnson The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published privately in 1912 and reissued in 1927, had portrayed dramatically the plight of talented, sensitive blacks in a segregated society. In 1919, two years after Mencken's essay, James Branch Cabell published Jurgen. Banned as a lewd and lascivious book, Jurgen mingled mythmaking, adventure, philosophy, and sex in an assault on the genteel tradition--South and North. In addition to putting the genteel tradition on the defensive, Jurgen provided Southerners with a model of the avante-garde in art. The rebellion was under way. In the fall of 1920, there gathered in Nashville, Tennessee, an extraordinary group of