From my reading of Southern novels, I’ve retained many images: the scent of magnolias wafting through the still, hot, moist air; a group of women sitting on a large verandah fanning themselves and drinking large glasses of sweetened iced tea; the honeyed drawl of their voices. These images are balanced, of course, by those from an entirely different sort of Southern novel: the large tobacco and cotton plantations; men and women (usually black) working long hours picking those crops; the painful legacy of slavery and, especially in novels published since the 1960s, the difficult issue of race relations.

The classic Southern novels are by William Faulkner. You’ll never know a fictional place as well as you come to know the invented Yoknapatawpha County, where Faulkner set such enduring novels as The Sound and the Fury; Go Down, Moses; and Absalom, Absalom!

That good black soil of the South has produced a great number of other wonderful novels as well. Try these, which I’ve grouped by the state in which they’re set:

• Alabama
• Mississippi
• Virginia

Recommend more Southern-Fried Fiction!

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