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Corra Harris was the most widely published and one of the most nationally popular woman writers in the United States during the twentieth century. Critics during her day and since have had a difficulty in categorizing Harris's works, often dismissing her work as part of a lightweight genre of domestic fiction. Harris's life and work do not fit wholly into any category. Harris simply defied characterization. Harris popularity and legacy first derived from A Circuit Rider's Wife. Since the book is marginally autobiographical, many readers remember Harris as the “circuit rider's wife”. This Introduction outlines the topics the other chapters in this book discuss. This book offers a glimpse of Harris's fascinating life and writing career. This book looks at the issues of race, class, and gender found in the works and literature of Harris. These issues found a constant struggle with the belief, experience, and values of Corra Harris. This book demonstrates the ways in which Harris's work and life both differed from and matched thouse of other southern women writers of her time. The book also reveals the manner in which time and place intersect with class, gender, race, and other variables in the forging of identity in her writing.

This chapter considers the response of southern writers, including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson, to public criticism of the South and negative associations of white southern identity. The Fugitives transformed into Agrarians, attempting to establish an expanded mythology of the white South characterized by a veneration of the sacred, a demonization of the urban, industrial wasteland, and an association of white southern culture with both high European culture and a singular, authentic Americanism.

This final chapter deals with the vast body of Alice Walker's literary and political work. All her novels, especially The Color Purple, Meridian, and The Third Life of Grand Copeman are discussed in detail. Walker left the South in 1971, yet the South remained central in all her novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, Walker rejected the label of southern writer.

This chapter attempts to provide a definition for a Southern woman writer. It asks: Who or what is a Southern woman writer? Should the emphasis be placed on Southern or on woman, or equally on both? An examination of writers who are or have been considered Southern yields the following attributes. One is that place of birth in itself is not a major factor in determining a Southern writer. More important than place of birth is the place central to the individual writer’s formative years. Hence, a writer whose imagination is nurtured by the South becomes a Southern writer. The Southern writer also sees himself or herself as being different.

This chapter focuses on twenty-first-century writers who carry on the rural southern tradition in their work. Since 2000, several young southern writers, nearly all born after 1975 and from middle-class rural and lower-class backgrounds, have begun to publish fiction. Both portraying the areas where they were born and grew up and transcending those settings to address more universal themes, they have produced a significant body of praiseworthy work. Most were born into rural families but received the benefits of post-secondary education, but all seem committed to presenting the working-class South with realism and empathy. Among these new novelists are Joe Samuel Starnes, Peter Farris, John Brandon, Wiley Cash, Skip Horack, Barb Johnson, Michael Farris Smith, and Jesmyn Ward. Clearly, novels that address southern characters in southern scenes will continue to be written, whether of the Rough South variety from writers like Johnson or from writers like Ward, Horack, Brandon, Cash, and Smith.

This chapter discusses the influence of William Faulkner on young writers, arguing that no contemporary writer can ignore his work. It contends that it is especially difficult to be a “southern” writer, that is, a writer born and raised in the South, at home with its traditions and history, and to follow in time after Faulkner. One of the most exciting discoveries about Faulkner for the young southern writer is his use of the material of southern life and history. Southern writers are very much aware that Faulkner did not invent his material. It was there to be mined and explored. The close student and the scholar of southern literature become increasingly aware of how much of that basic material was already a part of the literary tradition of the South before Faulkner appeared on the scene. The essay also considers the extent of the influence of the film on Faulkner's fiction.

In this chapter, John Grisham talks about William Faulkner and what a female reporter called “the Faulkner thing”. Grisham was in Dallas, or some other city, for a book tour for The Firm. A TV beat reporter then asked him, “How do you compare yourself with William Faulkner?” and added, “It must be diffilt to write in Oxford.” When Grisham asked why, the woman answered, “Well, you know, the Faulkner thing.” According to Grisham, it was the first time he heard “the Faulkner thing.” The reporter also asked him, “But what about the legend, the aura, the magic of Faulkner? I read somewhere that all Southern writers labor in the shadow of Faulkner.” Grisham replied that he is not a Southern writer, but a commercial writer who lives in the South. The woman's final question was whether Faulkner wrote for money.

This chapter explores the writing of Kate Chopin, focusing on her novel The Awakening. It argues that while Chopin is not technically a southerner and The Awakening does not always “feel” like a southern novel, both writer and text were shaped by the very specific contexts of southern literature. By setting her novel in south Louisiana, Chopin was also engaging issues critical to southern identity.

This chapter discusses the emergence of a new generation of southern writers who are giving voice to a different group of southerners, forcing their readers to reexamine long-held stereotypes and beliefs while challenging the literary roles traditionally assigned poor whites. According to Linda Tate, “traditionally, southern literature has been understood to be that written by white men and, on rare occasions, by white women—and, in almost all cases, by and about white southerners of the upper middle class.” This chapter looks at three new voices who write about the Rough South and the southern poor whites from within the class: Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Timothy Reese McLaurin. The term “Rough South” refers to as the world of the redneck or white trash. The terms “redneck,” “white trash,” “cracker,” and “poor white” have all been used to describe certain white southerners.

This chapter discusses how the South is depicted in literature as both a historical region and a mythical place. It considers the work of Richard Wright, including how he was influenced by Natchez and Mississippi, and southern writers Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, H. L. Mencken, and William Faulkner. It concludes that imagination works with reality to create a blend of fantasy and reality, thereby resulting in myth. When the artist is successful, the reader sometimes finds it difficult to separate myth and fantasy from fact and reality.

In this chapter, the author reflects on William Faulkner's influence on her and on other Southern writers. The author says it would be impossible to think of Oxford, Mississippi without thinking of Faulkner, its most famous citizen. She recalls growing up in Carrollton, but admits that it took her many long years in associating Oxford and the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) with Faulkner. It wasn't until she was in her early twenties and in graduate school at Vanderbilt that the author realized she must find out more about Faulkner. She began reading some of Faulkner's novels, including The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses and The Collected Stories. Critics inevitably compared her to Faulkner because of resemblances between their works. The author also reflects on three unanswered questions about Faulkner's work: his nihilism, his treatment of women characters, and the fictional Snopes family in his novels.

This chapter discusses the work of Cormac McCarthy, whose early novels depicted the poor white southerner. In The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Robert Benson praises McCarthy for his vivid and honest portrayal of east Tennessee and its people—the lower classes in particular. Benson accurately characterizes McCarthy's work as a critical shift in the representation of lower-class characters in southern literature. McCarthy's focus on exploring and illuminating the lives of those often called “white trash” suggests a direct and important link between his work of the 1960s and early 1970s and the work of later southern writers invested in recovering the poor white southerner from the margins of literary representation. And yet, for several reasons, McCarthy's connection to later Rough South writers is decidedly complex. Furthermore, not all critics have been as quick as Benson to praise McCarthy's portrayal of southern poor whites. This chapter examines McCarthy's first three novels: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1973).

This chapter discusses the fiction of William Gay, one of American literature's most authentic chroniclers of life in the Rough South. Gay died at his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, on February 23, 2012, at the age of seventy. His books were crafted from darkness: The Long Home (1999), Provinces of Night (2000), I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down (2002), and Twilight (2006). Along with Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and Harry Crews, Gay wrote about the lives of the underclass with both understanding and sincerity. Many important southern writers who came before—Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy—seem timid in comparison to Gay and his nightmarish depictions. Known for his unflinching portrayals of human cruelty in his fiction, Gay was in life a mild and dignified man.

This chapter discusses Lee Smith's fiction, which consistently probes the crises of identity that plague so many contemporary Americans, particularly women. Born on November 1, 1944, in the southwestern Virginia coal-mining town of Grundy, Lee Smith was an only child and a voracious reader. Smith recalls that growing up in Grundy, she consciously tried to conform to the image of an aspiring southern “lady.” Initially Smith wrote about romantic and foreign subjects, but after encountering Eudora Welty's work in a southern literature course, she realized the importance of writing from one's experience. Like other members of her generation of southern writers, Smith creates a full, complex world of characters who confirm some stereotypes and transcend others. Her novels include The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed (1968), The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed—Something in the Wind (1971), Fancy Strut (1973), Black Mountain Breakdown (1980), Family Linen (1985), Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), Saving Grace (1995), and On Agate Hill (2006).

This chapter describes Faulkner as the quintessentially canonical Southern writer. Faulkner is prominent among an extraordinary group of writers and thinkers referred to as anti-modern modernists. They used modernist forms to promote a critique of bourgeois modernity. Anti-modern modernism shaded over into the “producerist” critique of consumer culture and, though unfashionable, remains a powerful and important critical tradition. Faulkner participates in this tradition, but his world view contains and transcends the producerist perspective. This chapter aims to show that, while Faulkner does distinguish between true and false things, he also complicates that distinction in creative ways. Faulkner illuminates the complexity of things largely through his sensitivity to aesthetic form. His outlook on things took three major forms: he was a producerist critic of mass consumer culture, an anthropologist of that culture, and finally, a vernacular aesthete who sympathized with the longings embodied in things.