About this item
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.
About the Author
I'm a critic and journalist who lives in Brooklyn, but I left my heart in the place I grew up: Down South in Birmingham, Alabama.
In 2006, my parents moved from Birmingham to Jackson, Mississippi, four hours further south and west. When I visited them, I always gravitated towards the bookstore, of course, and soon developed a fascination with Jackson's patron literary saint, Eudora Welty. I had read her books before, but being in the place that she wrote about and lived felt different to me. There was a connection between her home and her writing that was almost tangible in Jackson, particularly in the garden of her house that curators had lovingly restored. Before I knew it I was plotting visits to other author's homes in the South, trying to piece together a sense of the place I grew up from the fiction about it.
My book, South Toward Home, is about that journey. I visited Oxford, Mississippi to peer into William Faulkner's liquor cabinet and visit Larry Brown and Barry Hannah's fishing spot, and traveled down to New Orleans to hunt out clues of the place John Kennedy Toole wrote about in Confederacy of Dunces. I went to Georgia to talk to Harry Crews' family, and spent a day with the peacocks at Andalusia, Flannery O'Connor's farm.
For more about the book (and the events I'm speaking at!) visit margareteby.com
