In 1917 when H. L. Mencken belittled the South as "almost as sterile artistically, intellectually and culturally as the Sahara Desert," he set off a reaction that is still reverberating today. The first issue of The Double Dealer out of New Orleans in 1921 pronounced it "high time, we believe, for some doughty clear-visioned penmen to emerge from the sodden marshes of Southern literature. " Hundreds did.
Supplanting the romantic novelists of the Old South, the new Southern fiction writer displayed an enormous diversity of interest and daring technique. Indeed, Southern fiction came to be viewed as perhaps the most significant movement in modern American writing.
Here in a quiz book pinpointing twentieth-century Southern writers are questions (and answers) that inquiring minds need to know. What do Southern writers care about? What fabulous characters inhabit their pages? What Southern titles should be on every reading list? The Southern Writers Quiz Book is full of tests for those who know and know they know Southern literature.
The quizzes included suggest a multitude of fascinating characters, exotic locales, and mythic minds. This book is a game of unabashed regional chauvinism. It professes absolutely no attempt to seek or show unifying principles of Southern writing. Instead, it exists for the sheer joy of bragg adocio. Play along, and you too can become a Southern Writers groupie.
Patti Carr Black is the author of Art in Mississippi, 1790-1980 and many other books about Mississippi art and writers. She formerly served as director of the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson.