Early and antebellum literature The earliest literature written in what would become the American South dates back to the
colonial era, in particular
Virginia; the explorer
John Smith wrote an account of the founding of the colonial settlement of
Jamestown in the early 17th century, while
planter William Byrd II kept a diary of his day-to-day affairs during the early 18th century. Both sets of recollections are critical documents in early Southern history. After the
American Revolution, in the early 19th century, the expansion of
Southern plantations fueled by slave labor began to distinguish Southern society and culture more clearly from the other states of the young nations. During this
antebellum period,
South Carolina, and particularly the city of
Charleston, rivaled and perhaps surpassed Virginia as a literary community. Writing in Charleston, the lawyer and essayist
Hugh Swinton Legare, the poets
Paul Hamilton Hayne and
Henry Timrod, and the novelist
William Gilmore Simms composed some of the most important works in antebellum Southern literature. In Virginia,
John Pendleton Kennedy gave an account of Virginia plantation life in his 1832 book
Swallow Barn. Simms was a particularly significant figure, perhaps the most prominent Southern author before the
American Civil War. His novels of frontier life and the American revolution celebrated the history of South Carolina. Like
James Fenimore Cooper, Simms was strongly influenced by Scottish author
Walter Scott, and his works bore the imprint of Scott's
romanticism. In
The Yemassee,
The Kinsmen, and the
anti-''Uncle Tom's Cabin novel
The Sword and the Distaff'', Simms presented idealized portraits of slavery and Southern life. While popular and well regarded in South Carolina—and highly praised by such critics as
Edgar Allan Poe—Simms never gained a large national audience. In Virginia,
George Tucker produced in 1824 the first fiction of Virginia colonial life with
The Valley of Shenandoah. He followed in 1827 with one of the country's first science fictions,
A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians. Tucker was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Virginia. In 1836 Tucker published the first comprehensive biography of Thomas Jefferson -
The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States. Some critics also regard Poe as a Southern author—he was raised in Richmond, attended the University of Virginia, and edited the
Southern Literary Messenger from 1835 to 1837. Yet in his poetry and fiction Poe rarely took up distinctly Southern themes or subjects; his status as a "Southern" writer remains ambiguous. In the Chesapeake region, meanwhile, antebellum authors of enduring interest include
John Pendleton Kennedy, whose novel
Swallow Barn offered a colorful sketch of Virginia plantation life; and
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, whose 1836 work
The Partisan Leader foretold the secession of the Southern states, and imagined a guerrilla war in Virginia between federal and secessionist armies. Not all noteworthy Southern authors during this period were white.
Frederick Douglass's
Narrative is perhaps the most famous first-person account of black slavery in the antebellum South.
Harriet Jacobs, meanwhile, recounted her experiences in bondage in North Carolina in
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And another Southern-born ex-slave,
William Wells Brown, wrote ''Clotel; or, The President's Daughter''—widely believed to be the first novel ever published by an
African-American. The book depicts the life of its title character, a daughter of
Thomas Jefferson and his black mistress, and her struggles under slavery.
The "Lost Cause" years In the second half of the 19th century, the South lost the Civil War and suffered through what many white Southerners considered a harsh occupation (called
Reconstruction). In place of the anti-Tom literature came poetry and novels about the "
Lost Cause of the Confederacy." This nostalgic literature began to appear almost immediately after the war ended;
The Conquered Banner was published on June 24, 1865. These writers idealized the defeated South and its lost culture. Prominent writers with this point of view included poets
Henry Timrod,
Daniel B. Lucas, and
Abram Joseph Ryan, and fiction writer
Thomas Nelson Page. Others, like
African American writer
Charles W. Chesnutt, dismissed this nostalgia by pointing out the
racism and exploitation of blacks that happened during this time period in the South. in 1856 George Tucker completed his final multivolume work in his
History of the United States, From Their Colonization to the End of the 26th Congress, in 1841. In 1884,
Mark Twain published what is arguably the most influential Southern novel of the 19th century,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway said of the novel, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn." This statement applies even more to Southern literature because of the novel's frank dealings with issues such as race and violence.
Kate Chopin was another central figure in post-Civil War Southern literature. Focusing her writing largely on the French Creole communities of Louisiana, Chopin established her literary reputation with the short story collections
Bayou Folk (1894) and
A Night in Acadie (1897). These stories offered not only a sociological portrait of a specific Southern culture but also furthered the legacy of the American short story as a uniquely vital and complex narrative genre. But it was with the publication of her second and final novel
The Awakening (1899) that she gained notoriety of a different sort. The novel shocked audiences with its frank and unsentimental portrayal of female sexuality and psychology. It paved the way for the Southern novel as both a serious genre (based in the realism that had dominated the Western novel since Balzac) and one that tackled the complex and untidy emotional lives of its characters. Today she is widely regarded as not only one of the most important female writers in American literature, but one of the most important chroniclers of the post-Civil War South and one of the first writers to treat the female experience with complexity and without condescension. During the first half of the 20th century, the lawyer, politician, minister, orator, actor, and author
Thomas Dixon, Jr., wrote a number of novels, plays, sermons, and non-fiction pieces which were very popular with the general public all over the USA. Dixon's greatest fame came from a trilogy of novels about
Reconstruction, one of which was entitled
The Clansman (1905), a book and then a wildly successful play, which would eventually become the inspiration for
D. W. Griffith's highly controversial 1915 film
The Birth of a Nation. Overall Dixon wrote 22 novels, numerous plays and film scripts, Christian sermons, and some non-fiction works.
The Southern Renaissance In the 1920s and 1930s, a renaissance in Southern literature began with the appearance of writers such as
William Faulkner,
Katherine Anne Porter,
Caroline Gordon,
Allen Tate,
Thomas Wolfe,
Robert Penn Warren, and
Tennessee Williams, among others. Because of the distance the
Southern Renaissance authors had from the
American Civil War and
slavery, they were more objective in their writings about the South. During the 1920s, Southern poetry thrived under the
Vanderbilt "
Fugitives". In nonfiction,
H.L. Mencken's popularity increased nationwide as he shocked and astounded readers with his satiric writing highlighting the inability of the South to produce anything of cultural value. In reaction to Mencken's essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart," the
Southern Agrarians (also based mostly around Vanderbilt) called for a return to the South's agrarian past and bemoaned the rise of Southern industrialism and urbanization. They noted that creativity and industrialism were not compatible and desired the return to a lifestyle that would afford the Southerner leisure (a quality the Agrarians most felt conducive to creativity). Writers like Faulkner, who won the
Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949, also brought new techniques such as
stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their writings. For instance, his novel
As I Lay Dying is told by changing narrators ranging from the deceased Addie to her young son. The late 1930s also saw the publication of one of the best-known Southern novels,
Gone with the Wind by
Margaret Mitchell. The
novel, published in 1936, quickly became a bestseller. It won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize, and in 1939 an equally famous
movie of the novel premiered. In the eyes of some modern scholars, Mitchell's novel consolidated white supremacist Lost Cause ideologies (see
Lost Cause of the Confederacy) to construct a bucolic plantation South in which slavery was a benign, or even benevolent, institution. Under this view, she presents white southerners as victims of a rapacious Northern industrial capitalism and depicts black southerners as either lazy, stupid, and over sexualized, or as docile, childlike, and resolutely loyal to their white masters. Southern literature has always drawn audiences outside the South and outside the United States, and
Gone with the Wind has continued to popularize harmful stereotypes of southern history and culture for audiences around the world. Despite this criticism,
Gone with the Wind has enjoyed an enduring legacy as the most popular American novel ever written, an incredible achievement for a female writer. Since publication,
Gone with the Wind has become a staple in many Southern homes.
Post World War II Southern literature Southern literature following the Second World War grew thematically as it embraced the social and cultural changes in the South resulting from the
Civil Rights Movement. In addition, more non-Christian, homosexual, female and
African-American writers began to be accepted as part of Southern literature, including African Americans such as
Zora Neale Hurston and
Sterling Allen Brown, along with women such as
Eudora Welty,
Flannery O'Connor,
Ellen Glasgow,
Carson McCullers,
Katherine Anne Porter, and
Shirley Ann Grau, among many others. Other well-known Southern writers of this period include
Reynolds Price,
James Dickey,
William Price Fox,
Davis Grubb,
Walker Percy, and
William Styron. One of the most highly praised Southern novels of the 20th century,
To Kill a Mockingbird by
Harper Lee, won the
Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1960. New Orleans native and Harper Lee's friend,
Truman Capote also found great success in the middle 20th century with ''
Breakfast at Tiffany's and later In Cold Blood. Another famous novel of the 1960s is A Confederacy of Dunces'', written by
New Orleans native
John Kennedy Toole in the 1960s but not published until 1980. It won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and has since become a
cult classic. Southern poetry bloomed in the decades following the Second World War in large part thanks to the writing and efforts of
Robert Penn Warren and
James Dickey. Where earlier work primarily championed a white, agrarian past, the efforts of such poets as Dave Smith,
Charles Wright,
Ellen Bryant Voigt,
Yusef Komunyakaa, Jim Seay,
Frank Stanford,
Kate Daniels,
James Applewhite,
Betty Adcock,
Rodney Jones, and former U.S. Poet Laureate
Natasha Trethewey have opened up the subject matter and form of Southern poetry. ==Contemporary Southern literature==