Outstanding Southern Literature
Explore the finest Southern literature with our curated list of outstanding books. Discover classic and contemporary Southern authors, rich storytelling, and deep cultural roots.
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The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century is the story of a family of Southern aristocrats on the brink of personal and financial ruin. • The definitive corrected text, including Faulkner's Appendix One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” —from The Sound and the Fury
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Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
by Janisse Ray
A memoir of a childhood, spend in an isolated Georgia community of Crackers, that grew into a passion to save the vanishing longleaf pine ecocystem in which she was raised.
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The Foreign Student
by Susan Choi
Highly acclaimed by critics, The Foreign Student is the story of a young Korean man, scarred by war, and the deeply troubled daughter of a wealthy Southern American family. In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by some dark episode in her past. Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation. Moving between the American South and South Korea, between an adolescent girl's sexual awakening and a young man's nightmarish memories of war, The Foreign Student is a powerful and emotionally gripping work of fiction.
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As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” —William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.
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ID: 0140121021
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Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
The classic civil war romanctic tale of Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler and the Civil War conflict.
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ID: 0142437328
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
From Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison comes the story of a young black girl who longs to be like the blond, blue-eyed children that America loves-a novel "so charged with pain and wonder that it becomes poetry" (The New York Times).
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Meridian
by Alice Walker
Meridian is a poignant and powerful story of the American South in the 1960s and of one woman who risks her life for the people she loves. Meridian Hill, a courageous young activist, creates peace and understanding by dedicating herself heart and soul to her civil rights work, touching the lives of all those she meets even when her health begins to deteriorate. With the old rules of Southern society collapsing around her, Meridian fights a lonely battle to reaffirm her own humanity, and that of all her people.
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ID: 0312278306
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ID: 0807118648
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