Word: faulknerisms
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Literature still provides the dominant myth of Dixie. Tennessee Williams' hostile parlors, James Dickey's blood rites. William Faulkner's epic feuds, Margaret Mitchell's antebellum aristocrats, Richard Wright's mangled blacks supply the melodramatic leads. Popular culture contributes the script. Barrelbellied redneck sheriffs and chanting, chain-gang Negroes have been staples of films since...
Twenty percent of its population are black. The other 80% are an amalgam of mint-julep aristocrats out of Faulkner's Sartoris clan, Mexican Americans from Texas, Roman Catholic Cajuns in Louisiana, Cubans and Jews in Miami, Vietnamese resettled on the Gulf Coast and Anglo-Saxon Baptists everywhere...
...values: family, community, roots. There was a new, only half-understood bond of sympathy between the only part of America ever to have lost a war and other Americans who had met their first defeat in Viet Nam. Summing up the Southern ability to outlast adversity, William Faulkner declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "I decline to accept the end of man... I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail." Most Americans, whether they knew those words or not, were suddenly more ready to receive their meaning...
...great art was possible-even likely-from such material, not much in fact resulted, at least until the 1920s when William Faulkner began cultivating Yoknapatawpha County, the patch of "rich deep black alluvial soil" that was alike his invention and his home. Suddenly, a whole generation of Southerners saw the ground beneath their feet for what it could be: a foothold on the universe. Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, early Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor-for close to 40 years, the line of inspired Southern writers seemed inexhaustible. Critics...
Fading Manners. Southern writers did not form a school. The works they produced were far less of a piece than is usually imagined. Welly's gentle, loving Mississippians live at a vast remove from Faulkner's tormented, often tormenting souls. Many Southern writers, in fact, have chafed at being pigeonholed as such. Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic whose brilliant short stories lacerated characters to get at their souls, once said flatly, "I'm interested in the old Adam. He just talks Southern because I do." But when her native land was ridiculed, she snapped, "When...