HUM 122-Southern Culture: Reading List Books online

Fleeing his drunken father and the civilizing influence of the Widow Douglas, Huckleberry Finn and the runaway slave Jim pilot a log raft down the mighty Mississippi River.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power.

A novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960's.

Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, is a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective. When her stepfather becomes increasingly more vicious toward her, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that tests the loyalty of her mother, Anney.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Will Tweedy's one-armed, renegade grandfather announces that he's aiming to marry the young Miss Love Simpson a bare three weeks after Granny Blakeslee has gone to her reward. The news is served up all over town with dinner, and young Will finds himself eyewitness to a major scandal.

Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life, Celie is left behind.

The Fairchilds, a big and clamorous family, live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. They are in the midst of planning their daughter's wedding when a nine-year-old relative, Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, comes to visit.

An 11-year-old heroine tells her unforgettable story with honesty, perceptivity, humor and unselfconscious heroism.

Ivy Rowe may not have much education, but her thoughts are classic, and her experiences are fascinating. Born near the turn of the century in the Virginia Mountains, Ivy's story is told completely through letters she is forever writing, and that you will forever want to read.

Gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode tells her life story to middle-aged Evelyn. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue, and all kinds of love and laughter—even an occasional murder.

Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled, manipulative daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, arrives at young womanhood just in time to see the Civil War forever change her way of life.

A man describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of'the Brotherhood', and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.

The true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the South's antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction.

Will Barrett, a Southern transplant to New York City, accepts a job in the Mississippi Delta as caretaker for the Vaught family's ailing son, Jamie. There, he is confronted not only by his personal demons, but also his growing love for Jamie's sister, Kitty, and a deepening relationship with the family that will teach him the true meaning of home.

Faulkner's novel about perseverance in the face of mortality features some of his most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.

Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave, is desperate to escape unscrupulous bill collectors and an impending marriage. He jumps aboard the first boat leaving New Orleans, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri.

Laurel, a young woman who has left the South, returns years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up.

The story of the Cantrell family and the odd curse that its members believe hangs over them.

Raney is a small-town Baptist. Charles is a liberal from Atlanta. This is the story of their marriage.

The classic novel of a Georgia family undone by the Great Depression.

Nicholas Burr, the son of a poor white farmer, rises to the governorship of Virginia. Yet his political success, tempered by disappointment in love, leads to a tragic outcome.

78-year-old Mattie Rigsbee has no business keeping a stray dog. When young, delinquent Wesley Benfield drops in on her life, he is even less likely a companion than the stray dog.

This triumphant autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four-year-old Shaw's oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story of a man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people -- and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about.

The true story of two people on opposite sides of the civil rights movement who forged a friendship that flourished against a backdrop of unrelenting bigotry.

Illuminating the moral dilemmas that lie at the heart of a slaveholding society, this book tells the story of a young slave who was sexually exploited by her master and ultimately executed for his murder.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and of slyly stubborn resistance to the indignities of segregation.

Anne Moody provides a first person account of growing up black in the rural South during the nineteen forties and fifties.

A journalist leads readers on a journey through the Old South, tangling with the forces of white rage, rebel grit, and regional pride in places where the Civil War is more than a memory.

From revered humorist and unapologetic curmudgeon Roy Blount, Jr., a collection of savagely funny and insightful takes on redneck heaven, whiskey, blood, possums, and a great number of other Southern things.

Provides a fundamental reinterpretation of the American South in the years since the Civil War, especially the decades after Reconstruction, from 1877 to 1920. Covering all aspects of Southern life--white and black, conservative and progressive, literary and political--it offers a new understanding of the forces that shaped the South of today.

The former Atlanta bureau chief of The New York Times illuminates the people, places, and passions of the influential American South--an area that has effectively decided the outcome of every presidential election in the past 30 years.

Weaves personal portraits of lesbian and gay Southerners with commentary about the impact of culture, race, and gender on the development of sexual identity.

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the locals. At eight years old and back with her mother in St. Louis, Maya is attacked—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime.

Tormented by her master, a young mother plots a daring escape, in this courageous and captivating slave narrative.

Jimmie Rodgers was a folk hero in his own lifetime and has been idolized by fans and emulated by performers ever since. This extensively-researched biography banishes the rumors and myths that have shrouded his life story.

The memoirs of William Alexander Percy, who was born and raised in Mississippi and witnessed the social changes at the turn of the century.

Uncovers the voices and experiences of workers in the Southern cotton mill industry during the 1920s and 1930s.

Daniel Clark demonstrates the dramatic impact unionization made on the lives of textile workers in Henderson, North Carolina, in the decade after World War II.

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery on a plantation in Maryland. As a young boy, he served in a household, but he faced increasingly brutal conditions and cruel owners. After many years, he escaped to freedom in New York City and began to publicly denounce slavery through writings and speeches. This unabridged version of Douglass's powerful autobiography, first published in 1845, provides an honest, firsthand account of the horrors of slavery in the United States.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Martin Luther King's early years and rise to greatness.

confronts the awful irony that the war to free blacks from slavery also freed racism. He Examines the shift in the power base of Southern white leadership after 1850 and recounts the terrible violence done to blacks in the name of self-protection.

Rather than emphasizing the cruelty and degradation of slavery, historian Eugene Genovese investigates the ways that slaves forced their owners to acknowledge their humanity through culture, music, and religion.

In Separate Pasts, Melton A. McLaurin honestly and plainly recalls his boyhood during the 1950s, an era when segregation existed unchallenged in the rural South.

Celebrates the food of the American South in all its glorious variety—yesterday, today, at home, on the road, in history.

A revealing, disturbing, elegiac book about the American South—from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill.

An anthropological overview of one Southern community and in-depth analysis of four extended families, this book dispels misconceptions about the Southern black family and shows it to be a coherent, well-defined, and viable structure.