It is hard to imagine what American literature would be like today were it not for writers from Mississippi who penned some of literature’s most compelling and enduring stories.

Names like William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams conjure images of driven, impassioned artists who are today remembered not just for their storytelling abilities, but for reinvigorating and defining the very soul of Mississippi literature. Like music, literature is everywhere in Mississippi; it can be found in Greenwood, Oxford, Yazoo City, Vicksburg, Jackson, Starkville, Columbus, Pascagoula, and in hundreds of small towns and locales throughout the state. Since the early 1920’s, Mississippi has produced more literary artists than any other state in the nation. Many of them today permanently inhabit the pantheon of American literature: Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Clifton Taulbert, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, Willie Morris, and hundreds more. What is it that produces the sheer abundance and diversity of literary genius from a state some consider the most backward in the nation?

The unbroken lineage of great southern literature in Mississippi began in the 1920’s and 1930’s with a movement known as the “Southern Renaissance” and a new, macabre writing style native only to the American South called “Southern Gothic.” Prior to this renaissance, southern writers in general focused on the idyllic nature of life in the south that existed before the Civil War, focusing on romantic and chivalrous themes that had been driving forces in American life. By the 1920’s, however, Mississippi writers dismissed the popular Antebellum stereotypes of the happy slave, the chaste southern belle and the chivalrous gentleman as useless nostalgia, focusing instead on more pressing social and racial issues of the day through the interpretive conventions of the Gothic narrative. At its best – as in Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily – the writing stripped away the layers of accepted social convention to reveal the dark truths and harsh realities of life that had been institutionalized in southern society and accepted for generations.

Mississippi writers tended to focus on the burden of their southern history in a region where people still remembered the Civil War, slavery, and the tragedies of reconstruction. They also concentrated on the South’s fleeting social conventions, which held that family and honor were more highly valued than one’s personal life. Finally, the writers addressed the South’s troubled issues of social and racial injustice under Jim Crow. To have an effective voice, these Southern Gothic writers used deeply flawed, grotesque characters as a way of highlighting the disturbing aspects of the people and culture without being too literal or overly moralistic. New writing techniques were developed, such as the stream-of-consciousness narration that Faulkner was so famous for. The ordinary conventions of Modernist writing along with complex narrative devices were combined to define and guide the plot. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Tennessee Williams’ play Orpheus Descending are both examples of works that employed these combinations of creative writing techniques. Among all the writers of the Southern Renaissance, William Faulkner is undoubtedly the most famous and influential, with his novel As I Lay Dying considered among literature’s greatest works and for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

Whether it is Faulkner’s brutally lurid tale of unrepentant racism in the short story Barn Burning or the tortured illusions of Blanch Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Mississippi literature is America’s literature. Even in the face of tremendous changes in the modern fabric of the American south, Mississippi literature and the southern Gothic thrives and continues to inspire new generations of young writers throughout the nation.

Other stories in this series:

A GOOD AUTHOR IS HARD TO FIND
A STREETCAR NAMED TENNESSEE
BARD OF THE AMERICAN ILLIAD