The South and it's writers

I am reading Flannery O'Connor's "Mystery and Manners" right now, and very much enjoying it. I am finding her reflections especially relevant because she talks a lot about Southern culture and it's people, and the Southern writer.

And so, a quote for tonight:

"The best American fiction has always been regional. The ascendancy passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed and stayed the longest wherever their has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light.

In these things the South still has a degree of advantage. It is a slight degree and getting slighter, but it is a degree of kind as well of intensity, and it is enough to feed great literature if our people - whether they are newcomers or have roots here - are enough aware of it to foster its growth in themselves.

Every serious writer will put his finger on it at a slightly different spot but in the same region of sensitivity.

...The writer operates at a particular crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location."

~ Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners