South Toward Home: Travels in Southern LiteratureBy Margaret Eby
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South Toward Home: Travels in Southern LiteratureBy Margaret Eby
Read and Download Ebook South Toward Home: Travels in Southern LiteratureBy Margaret Eby
A literary travelogue into the heart of classic Southern literature.
What is it about the South that has inspired so much of America's greatest literature? And why, when we think of Flannery O'Connor or William Faulkner or Harper Lee, do we think of them not just as writers, but as Southern writers? In South Toward Home, Margaret Eby―herself a Southerner―travels through the South in search of answers to these questions, visiting the hometowns and stomping grounds of some of our most beloved authors. From Mississippi (William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright) to Alabama (Harper Lee, Truman Capote) to Georgia (Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews) and beyond, Eby looks deeply at the places that these authors lived in and wrote about. South Toward Home reveals how these authors took the people and places they knew best and transmuted them into lasting literature.
Side by side with Eby, we meet the man who feeds the peacocks at Andalusia, the Georgia farm where Flannery O'Connor wrote her most powerful stories; we peek into William Faulkner's liquor cabinet to better understand the man who claimed civilization began with distillation and the "postage stamp of native soil" that inspired him; and we go in search of one of New Orleans's iconic hot dog vendors, a job held by Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. From the library that showed Richard Wright that there was a way out to the courtroom at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird, Eby grapples with a land fraught with history and mythology, for, as Eudora Welty wrote, "One place understood helps us understand all places better."
Combining biographical detail with expert criticism, Eby delivers a rich and evocative tribute to the literary South.
map South Toward Home: Travels in Southern LiteratureBy Margaret Eby- Amazon Sales Rank: #150820 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.60" h x .90" w x 5.80" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
Review “Well-informed and lively…. This young author is unafraid to hunt big game…. [Eby] demonstrates apt critical insights and offers biographical tidbits from a thorough reading of the authors’ life stories…. This reviewer would happily read a sequel.” (Howell Raines - New York Times Book Review)“[A] fascinating paean to the people and places that inspired some of the most revered chroniclers of life below the Mason-Dixon line…. Eby lyrically uncovers a bit of the magic that makes a southern writer southern.” (Josh Steele - Entertainment Weekly)“[An] engaging journey…. Eby offers something you can’t get on tours.” (Anushah Jiwani - Oxford American)“As Elif Batuman did for Russian literature in The Possessed and Olivia Laing did for alcoholic writers in The Trip to Echo Spring, so Margaret Eby does for Southern writers in South Toward Home.” (Michael Bourne, The Millions)“A delightful love letter to the South and…an apt reminder that the South is no literary backwater but a world of letters all its own.” (Publishers Weekly)“An illuminating journey to the homes, towns, and landscapes that nurtured ten Southern writers…. Eby brings a fine sensibility to her readings…and, in polished prose, offers a fresh look at their lives and literary legacies.” (Kirkus Reviews)“A sweetly personal yet embracingly informative book…. Eby entices us to enjoy their work either for the first time or once again.” (Booklist, Starred review)“Margaret Eby brings an enviable ease and intelligence to this exploration of ten essential Southern writers and the landscapes from which their books were formed. Her travels should offer you either an excellent introduction to these authors or a bracing reminder of their worth, and indeed, turning these pages, I recalled why I first fell in love with those whose books I know well and was persuaded to reinvestigate those whose books I don't.” (Kevin Brockmeier)
About the Author Margaret Eby has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Bookforum, Salon, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she now lives in New York City.
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Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful. Look Southward for some Answers By Margie Read What a splendid review of some of the South's best known writers. As has been pointed out "some of us can read; some of us can even write" and the discussion by Eby of some of these Southern writers is of value to those who want to know more about them and their work. The book should be especially valuable to those who teach. Solid evaluations are made and comments that lead to a better understanding of the works of those writers included. Any teacher of American /Southern Literature should have this book in his or her classroom. No one can come up with a reason why Southerners seem better writers than those from other sections of the United States, but Eby comes as close as we have seen to establishing some of the reasons. Highly recommended. .
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful. A great way to evoke the literature of particular southern places and the writers that described them! By D. Locicero Full disclosure: I received this as a Goodreads giveaway, but that in no way affects the review which follows.What is it about southern writers and southern literature that create a unique literary genre? Answering that question is the purpose of South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature by Margaret Eby. (And, yes, the title was inspired by Willie Morris' 1967 memoir, North Toward Home.)Let me begin by saying that both the Introduction and the Coda are well worth reading - don't be tempted to skip over them! Here are two quotes from the introduction to whet your appetite:First, "Southern writing at its loftiest is a literature of opposition. It is a rebuff, in equal measure, to those who imagine the region as a place of shoeless yokels, and those who mythologize it as one where sweet-faced, big-haired debutantes in hoop skirts dole out petit fours, mind their manners, and maintain deep roots to their family elders."And from the following page, "What makes a southern writer a southern writer is not just the circumstances of his or her birth, but a fierce attachment to a particular place, and a commitment to exploring its limits in his or her work."On a journey following several of those notable southern writers through Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and (New Orleans) Lousiana, Eby fleshes out her ideas about the connections between the writers she has chosen to include and special places in their writing lives. As someone with southern roots, I appreciated her careful crafting of the descriptions that draw the reader into her thesis, and I believe she supports it well. There really do appear to be tangible connections between particular places and these writers' affinities for them. What a well-written and enjoyable book!My recommendation: Go ahead; read this book -- and delve into the southern soul.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. What defines a Southern writer? -- approached through ten Southern authors and visits to their hometowns By R. M. Peterson Margaret Eby addresses a matter that has occupied many other literary critics: what defines a Southern writer? Eby's thesis is that "what makes a Southern writer a Southern writer is not just the circumstances of his or her birth but a fierce attachment to a particular place, and a commitment to exploring its limits in his or her work." She illustrates that thesis through traveling to the hometowns of ten famous writers from the Deep South. SOUTH TOWARD HOME adopts a singular and useful approach to the question of what defines a Southern writer, and in Eby's hands it turns out to be an engaging and informative book on the literature of the South.The ten writers around whom Eby organizes her book are Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Harper Lee and Truman Capote, John Kennedy Toole, and Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. Visiting their homes takes her to Jackson and Oxford in Mississippi, Milledgeville and Bacon County in Georgia, Monroeville in Alabama, and New Orleans.The reader learns a lot about Eby's authors, in a relaxed, non-pedantic fashion. I already knew a fair amount about Faulkner and O'Connor, but even with them I gained a richer understanding. I found Eby's discussions of Welty and Toole especially informative. (I finished the book with a resolve to read more of Welty's novels soon, and perhaps re-read "Confederacy of the Dunces", about which I was less than enthusiastic the first time around.)Eby's prose is ideal for a book of this sort. It is smooth and flowing, never calling attention to itself.Ultimately, I doubt that SOUTH TOWARD HOME will end the musings about what it is that defines a Southern writer -- though I am certain that Eby, who comes across as even-keeled, is not so presumptuous or arrogant to pretend that her book is the be-all and end-all. (I tend to think that the matter is related to the overwhelming influence of Faulkner on matters literary, and he just happened to hail from the South.) In the course of the book, Eby does offer reflections from other writers on the subject, two of which from Eudora Welty are worth repeating:* "'Regional,' I think, is a careless term, as well as a condescending one, because what it does is fail to differentiate between the localized raw material of life and its outcome as art. 'Regional' is an outsider's term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing, because as far as he knows he is simply writing about life."* "[Southern writers] do not need reminding of what our subject is. It is humankind, and we are all part of it. When we write about people, black or white, in the South or anywhere, if our stories are worth the reading, we are writing about everybody."
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