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Title: South Toward Home

Subtitle: Travels in Southern Literature

Author: Margaret Eby

Narrator: Susan Bennett

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-09-15

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 5 votes

Genres: Travel & Adventure, Essays & Travelogues

Publisher's Summary:

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' 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.

Members Reviews:

What defines a Southern writer? -- approached through ten Southern authors and visits to their hometowns

Margaret Eby addresses a matter that has occupied many other literary critics: what defines a Southern writer? Eby's thesis is that "what makes a Southern writer a Southern writer is not just the circumstances of his or her birth but a fierce attachment to a particular place, and a commitment to exploring its limits in his or her work." She illustrates that thesis through traveling to the hometowns of ten famous writers from the Deep South. SOUTH TOWARD HOME adopts a singular and useful approach to the question of what defines a Southern writer, and in Eby's hands it turns out to be an engaging and informative book on the literature of the South.

The ten writers around whom Eby organizes her book are Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Harper Lee and Truman Capote, John Kennedy Toole, and Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. Visiting their homes takes her to Jackson and Oxford in Mississippi, Milledgeville and Bacon County in Georgia, Monroeville in Alabama, and New Orleans.

The reader learns a lot about Eby's authors, in a relaxed, non-pedantic fashion. I already knew a fair amount about Faulkner and O'Connor, but even with them I gained a richer understanding. I found Eby's discussions of Welty and Toole especially informative.