Books about the South

Prince of Tides (and his other books)

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus

I took a Southern Women Writers course in college, and here are some titles I remember from it –

* *Bitter in the Mouth* by Monique Truong – novel about a Carolina girl with synesthesia.
* *Sing, Unburied, Sing* by Jesmyn Ward – novel about a Mississippi woman who can see the dead. Ward has good southern gothic novels.
* *The Heart is a Lonely Hunter* by Carson McCullers – novel about a deaf-mute in a Southern town in I think the 1930s.

If you like paranormal horror novels, you could try *The Hollow Places* and *A House with Good Bones* by T. Kingfisher. They’re not gory or anything. Also check out Pat Conroy, Zora Neale Hurston, and Harper Lee.

For nonfiction books –

* *Gender and Jim Crow* by Glenda Gilmore – this is kind of thick history, but worth it. A lot of times the narrative around Black Americans is slavery > Emancipation Proclamation > disenfranchisement > Jim Crow. But Gilmore talks about several decades where Black Southerners, especially Black women, were working their asses off to establish themselves as ‘respectable’ middle class.
* *Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil* by John Berendt – this is a Southern classic, about a true crime case in Savannah, GA (if you have the chance to go, take it).
* *Dixie’s Daughters* by Karen Cox – more thick history about the Daughters of the Confederacy, which is the organization that put up so many racist monuments around the South. During the monument controversy, Cox published a follow-up, *No Common Ground*.
* *They Were Her Property* by Stephanie E. Jones-Roger – another thick history, but I think this one’s important because some people like to argue that white women weren’t complicit in enslavement. They completely were, and white women enslavers could be just as cruel as their husbands.
* *Necropolis* by Kathryn Olivarius – I read this recently, and it’s fascinating. It’s about yellow fever in New Orleans, and how the city kind of built its economy around the disease. It really shows the lengths white Southerners would go to in order to rationalize slavery and maintain white supremacy.

I did my master’s thesis on womanhood in the South after the Civil War, so most of what I can recommend for nonfiction are really chunky monographs lol. Where in NC are you moving to? The Triangle?

oh – if you like to cook, I just received *When Southern Women Cook* for Christmas. I love it – it’s from America’s Test Kitchen, which has great recipes, and includes blurbs about the history of Southern recipes and ingredients.

And as for *Gone with the Wind* – I do think it’s worth reading, but it should be taken with a lot of salt. It shows a really idealized view of the South that didn’t really exist. I read it when I was 13 and it gave me really wrong ideas about slavery.

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry

You will like Ron Rash novels! He teaches history but also writes very well.

The Barn!