Literature
Here, great literature lives forever.
In addition to a long history of publishing award-winning poets, Southern Cultures has published provocative fiction, memoir, and many literary essays and interviews. You can read all of this material through the Project Muse digital library by following the individual links.
Our literary content falls under these six headings:
New Content (any content newly available online and/or from our latest issues); Fiction & Creative Nonfiction; Memoir, Autobiographical Reflections, Interviews; Essays & Features; Poetry; and Book Reviews.
This is Literature (part I), which includes content that falls under the first two headings.
Part II is here and III is here.
New Content (recently posted online for the first time)
The Country Child, When Overpraised
by Allan Gurganus
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
On Winslow Homer's Weaning the Calf
by James Applewhite
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
The Resurrection of Christ
by David Sedaris
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
Thomas Hart Benton and the Thresholds of Expression
by Robert Morgan
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
The Goal of a Realist
by Doris Betts
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
Rituals of Initiation and Rebellion: Adolescent Responses to Segregation in Southern Autobiography
by Melton McLaurin
What can the autobiographies of black and white southerners coming of age in the segregated South tell us about race?
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers on Art
Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism
by Mark Royden Winchell
reviewed by Michael Kreyling
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1997: Writers On Art
A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe
by Pat Conroy
The author of The Great Santini reveals a long admiration for the author of Look Homeward, Angel.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999
The Sacrament of Remembrance:
Donald Davidson and the Southern Past
by Paul V. Murphy
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995: Memory
Home Ground: Southern Autobiography
By J. Bill Berry, editor
reviewed by Dolan Hubbard
Southern Cultures, Inaugural Issue
Paul Green and the Southern Literary Renaissance
by John Herbert Roper
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1994
Exiles and Fugitives: The Letters of Jacques and Raîssa Maritain, Allen Tate, and Carolina Gordon
John M. Dunaway, editor
reviewed by Alphonse Vinh
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1994
Incident at the Depot
by Paul Green
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1994
Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Biography
by Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell, editors
reviewed by Margaret M. Geddy
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1995
Dearest Chums and Partners--Joel Chandler Harris's Letters to His Children
by Hugh T. Keenan, editor
reviewed by David B. Parker
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1995
The Fable of the Southern Writer
by Lewis P. Simpson's
reviewed by Michael Kreyling
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
by Eric J. Sundquist
reviewed by Joel Williamson
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995
Erskine Caldwell: A Biography
by Harvey L. Klevar
reviewed by Fred Hobson
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995
An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827-67
by Michael O'Brien
reviewed by Christopher Morris
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 1996
The Novel as Social History: Erskin Caldwell's
God's Little Acre and Class Relations in the New South
by Bryant Simon
The author explores deep divisions between early twentieth-century South Carolina's farmers and mill hands as seen in the work of Erskine Caldwell and in recent labor history.
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Numbers 3/4, Fall/Winter 1996
Southern Writers and Their Worlds
by Christopher Morris and Steven G. Reinhardt, editors
reviewed by Tonita Branan
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1997
A Nine Year Old Boy's Memories of World War I
by Floyd Waldrep
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1997
John E. Cashin, editor
Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old South
reviewed by Kathryn McKee
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 1997: Sports
Bertram Wyatt-Brown's
The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family and
The Literary Percys: Family History, Gender, and the Southern Imagination
reviewed by Tom McHaney
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997
Jay Tolson, editor
The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy
reviewed by Fred Hobson
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997
Roland L. Freeman's
A Communion of Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories
reviewed by David Crosby
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997
Margaret Earley Whitt's
Understanding Flannery O'Connor
Ted R. Spivey's
Flannery O'Connor: The Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary
Joanne Halleran McMullen's
Writing against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O'Connorreviewed by Rachel V. Mills
Southern Cultures, Volume 3, Number 4, Winter 1997
Mary Ann Wimsatt, editor
Tales of the South by William Gilmore Simms
reviewed by Johanna Nicol Shields
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1998: Politics
The Great Wagon Road, or How History Knocked the Professor Cold, or A Storyteller's Story, or Why Appalachians Are Mountains and a People
poetry by Michael Chitwood
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998
Trudier Harris's
The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan
reviewed by Margaret D. Bauer
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998
Dan B. Miller's
Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road
Wayne Mixon's
The People's Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South
reviewed by Bryant Simon
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998
Yoknapatawpha: Images and Voices
by George G. Stewart
Haunting photographs from Mississippi evoke William Faulkner's mythical landscape.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 3, Fall 1998
Charles Reagan Wilson's
Judgment & Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis
reviewed by Wayne Flynt
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 3, Fall 1998
Faulkner and Southern History: A View from Germany
by Peter Nicolaisen
An account of one German novelist's struggle with his nation's past, and of Faulkner's resonance within German culture.
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 4, Winter 1998: The South in the World
Dorothy M. Scura, editor
Ellen Glasgow: New Perspectives
reviewed by Susan V. Donaldson
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 4, Winter 1998: The South in the World
J. Lee Greene's
Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel's First Century
reviewed by John Leland
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 4, Winter 1998: The South in the World
Clutching the Chains that Bind: Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind
by Drew Gilpin Faust
Drew Faust has some things to say about Scarlett O'Hara, the South's favorite bad belle. Three other scholars of southern women's literature and history talk back.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
Race and the Cloud of Unknowing in Gone with the Wind
by Patricia Yaeger
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
"I Was Tellin It": Race, Gender, and the Puzzle of the Storyteller
by Anne Goodwyn Jones
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
"The Prong of Love"
by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
Thomas E. Douglass's
A Room Forever: The Life, Work, and Letters of Breece D'J Pancake
reviewed by Ruel Foster
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999: Scarlett O'Hara
"We were the Snopeses": A Writer and Her Piedmont
by Doris Betts
An unexpected kinship with Flannery O'Connor and an exploration of what it means to be a "piedmonter."
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999
The Souths of Sterling A. Brown
by Elizabeth Davey
Revealing a fuller African American experience.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999
Reimagining the North-South Reunion: Southern Women Novelists and the Intersectional Romance, 1876-1900
by Jane Turner Censer
Affairs of the heart reunite North and South.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999
Tom Wolfe's
A Man in Full
reviewed by John Shelton Reed
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999
John C. Guilds and Caroline Collins, editors
William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier, and: From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms
reviewed by Michael O'Brien
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999
Tom Rankin, editor
Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain
reviewed by Christopher Brookhouse
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999
Grave Matters
by Elizabeth Robeson
Zora Neale Hurston's correspondence with W. E. B. Du Bois in 1929 reveals her concern about how prominent African Americans of their era were honored after death.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999
"How the negros [sic] became McCaslins too...": A New Faulkner Letter
by Noel Polk
William Faulkner, the architect of Go Down, Moses, flirts with his good friend's wife in a nearly-lost letter and drops a few clues left out of the book's famous ledgers.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999
Killers Real and Imagined
by Doris Betts
Real-life tragedy is the genesis for lasting art when the murder of Medgar Evers sparks the muse of Eudora Welty.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999
Every Man Has Got the Right To Get Killed? The Civil War Narratives of Mary Johnston and Caroline Gordon
by Sarah E. Gardner
The vivid--and graphic--novels of two women authors usher in new views of the War and redefine a genre.
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999
Mojo Productions, in association with Company Carolina and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Department of Communication Studies
Good Ol' Girls, the world premiere
reviewed by Shannon Ravenel
"She'll bring you casseroles and she'll kill you, too."
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999
Nancy C. Parrish's
Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers
reviewed by Amy Thompson McCandless
"It was like falling into a womb."
Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999
The Southern Autobiographical Impulse
by Bill Berry
"It's loyalty to the wrong that's the true test of character."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2000: 5th Year Anniversary
The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers
Featuring the Fiction of Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and Tim McLaurin
by Erik Bledsoe
"White trash is no longer something to sweep out the back door."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2000: 5th Year Anniversary
The Strange Career of Atticus Finch
by Joseph Crespino
"Certain school districts across the country have censoredTo Kill a Mockingbird for its sexual content, and some have banned the book because of its depiction of racism."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2000
The Lessons
poetry by Michael McFee
". . . we were in jail, being frisked and questioned . . ."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 3, Fall 2000
New Content (recently published)
Southern Snow
by Nancy Hatch Woodward
"There's a silence in a snowy dawn that forces you to look anew at what has been transformed from the customary landscape of your day-to-day life. Dogwoods glisten in their silver finery; bowing fir limbs form a secret cathedral."
$0.99 download for Kindle, for Nook, or for Sony Reader
Full Issue for Kindle, for Nook, or for Sony Reader
Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
Bourbon
poetry by R. T. Smith
". . . Earl was a steady liar who never in his life solved
a single crime, to hear my father tell it, an improvident
soul prone to nocturnal misdemeanors himself . . ."
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Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
Native Ground
photographs by Rob McDonald
"If convention has it right, these are writers who bear something close to a genetic predisposition to produce a literature suffused with place."
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Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
Turned Inside Out
Black, White, and Irish in the South
by Bryan Giemza
"As a place where Black and Green were in perpetual contact, the Atlantic South furnishes an ideal case study in how these peoples moved with, against, and around one another."
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Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
Poem with a Refrain from Charley Patton
poetry by Travis Smith
". . . and now the guitar's high note
sings what he can't sing. . ."
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Southern Cultures Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2011: Music
Alice Walker on Cold Mountain
Allan Gurganus on Sherman's March
Randall Kenan on Ode to Billie Joe
Joe Flora on Sweet Bird of Youth
Elizabeth Spencer on Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers
$0.99 download includes writing from Walker, Gurganus, Kenan, Turan, Flora, Garrison, and Spencer, as well as the Cheshire introduction, in eBook formats for KINDLE, for NOOK, or for SONY LIBRARY READER
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from Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
“Big Bone Lick,” “Big Talk,” and “Flush”
three poems by Robert Morgan
" . . . for ten millennia, the bones
seemed wreckage from a mighty dream . . . "
Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
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No Sweat: Memories of Southern Appalachia memoir
by Danny Fulks
"Cooney Simms, the grocer, had a big Philco floor-model radio with push buttons and short wave. Neighbors gathered around when Joe Lewis was fighting. And wasn't he always this good giant who whipped Adolph Hitler's man Max Schmeling? Static wasn't too bad; one could hear Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats if they didn't come on the same time as the Grand Ole Opry."
Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
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Hot Springs, Arkansas memoir
by Keith Maillard
"‘Well, of course I remember Pearl Harbor,' my mother says, the tone of her voice adding,What do you think I am, an idiot? She and my grandmother were working in the shop when they heard on the radio that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She was five months pregnant with me. It was a Sunday. They'd never heard of Pearl Harbor."
Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
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Catfish and Home memoir
by Josh Eure
"Jimmy ‘Catfish' Hunter pitched for the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees and in 1987 was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame-all the while maintaining his small-town farming roots. He played every game with the shotgun pellets from a childhood hunting accident lodged in his foot, and natives imagined he held a major piece of them in his cleats."
Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2011: Memory
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Fiction & Creative Nonfiction
“Fabor”
from the novel Nashville Chrome
by Rick Bass
with an introduction by Jocelyn R. Neal
“She wasn’t going to sleep with him, of course—not to improve her voice, or for any other reason—but she worried about it, was made a little insecure by that sustained gnawing that she was somehow holding her siblings back.”
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2010: Music IV
The Cottage Mover
by Bland Simpson
“Over on Roanoke Island, any number of homes in Manteo now stand on foundations they were not built upon, thanks to this man’s work. There was nothing he couldn’t move—why, I believe he once moved a small hotel!"
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Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2010
"Buffalo Gals"
by Elaine Neil Orr
"A Buffalo Gal would not be bowled over by every little thing that came along."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2008
"Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals:
The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering"
by Bland Simpson
"The mystery of the missing crew and abandoned ship was colored by international-and local-intrigue: prohibition bootlegging, international piracy, Bolshevik anarchy, a message in a bottle, rogue World War I German submarines, and a rebellious crew."
Southern Cultures, Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002: Ghosts
Browse Memoirs, Autobiographical Reflections,
Interviews, and Essays and Features at
Literature part II.
Poetry and Book Reviews at
Literature part III.