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    South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature
    South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature
    South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature
    Audiobook6 hours

    South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature

    Written by Margaret Eby

    Narrated by Susan Bennett

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 8, 2015
    ISBN9781501902147
    South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature

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    Reviews for South Toward Home

    3.5/5

    13 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Southern fiction is full of images, places and icons that our minds associate strongly with specific authors or novels. Think of the courthouse in To Kill a Mockingbird, William Faulkner's glass of whisky, Flannery O'Connor's peacocks. Margaret Eby made pilgrimages to Monroeville, Alabama; Oxford and Jackson, Mississippi; Milledgeville and Bacon County, Georgia; and New Orleans, Louisiana, to visit the stomping grounds and geographical inspirations of ten of her own personal favorite authors, chronicling each stop in a fascinating essay that is part homage, part literary criticism, part exploration of the question "What is it about this place {the SOUTH}, exactly" that has led to the creation of the concept of "Southern fiction".
    • 4/5
      Jackson, Mississippi and Eudora WeltyRichard Wright.FaulknerFlannery O'ConnerHarry CrewHarper Lee and Truman CapoteJohn Kennedy TooleLarry BrownBarry HannahThere are a few of these authors whose books I never read. This book definitely made me want to read them, so I will be reading from the reading list the author kindly provided in the back of the book. Looking forward to this task. This gives such a wonderful insight into their novels, their lives and how the testaments of many of them have lived on. Quite some characters they all were, some admired each other, others didn't care for the some of them and found their books to be cop outs. Used their own small spaces of earth to write about things that they questioned or just brought to life their own small corner of space.Harry Crew is not celebrated at all in his town, where he has a cousin who still lives. Nothing was preserved and the people don't like to talk about his books. He ins one of the authors I have never read and I found interesting what was revealed in this book about his non fiction offering [book:A Childhood: The Biography of a Place|24849] and his character as well.A delightful read, revealing to me a different and fresh way of looking at these wonderful authors. She brought New Orleans, Bourbon street to life to life, following the path of the Confederacy of Dunces. Interesting to see how their legacies live on and how they are now perceived by readers.ARC from publisher.