The Fable of the Southern Writer

by Lewis P. Simpson

Overview

"With a breadth and depth unsurpassed by any other cultural historian of the South, Lewis Simpson examines the writing of southerners Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Arthur Crew Inman, William Styron, and Walker Percy. Simpson offers challenging essays of easy erudition blessedly free of academic jargon.... [They] do not propose to support an overall thesis, but simply explore the southern writer's unique relationship with his or her region, bereft of myth and tradition, in the grasp of science and history." -- Library Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807153505
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	10/14/2003
Series:	Jules and Frances Landry Award
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

ewis P. Simpson, former coeditor of the Southern Review,is Boyd Professor and William A. Read Professor of English, emeritus, at Louisiana State University. A founding member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and past president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, he is the author or editor of more than thirteen books, including Mind and the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost Causes, winner of the Avery O. Craven Award.

Table of Contents

	Preface	xiii
	Prologue: John Randolph and the Inwardness of History	1
I	The Fable of the Agrarians and the Failure of the American Republic	13
II	A Fable of White and Black: Jefferson, Madison, Tate	24
III	History and the Will of the Artist: Elizabeth Madox Roberts	54
IV	War and Memory: Quentin Compson's Civil War	73
V	The Tenses of History: Faulkner	96
VI	The Poetry of Criticism: Allen Tate	114
VII	The Loneliness Artist: Robert Penn Warren	132
VIII	The Last Casualty of the Civil War: Arthur Crew Inman	155
IX	From Thoreau to Walker Percy: Home by Way of California; or, The End of the Southern Renascence	183
	Epilogue: A Personal Fable: Living with Indians	208
	Acknowledgments	239
	Index	241