The Best Southern Novels of All Time

Ocford American ^ | August 27 2009

[Borges]

# 1 ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1936) (120 votes)

A profound exploration of race and all its attendant complexities. Faulkner’s rendering of the Southern “class” struggle through the life of one figure, Thomas Sutpen, makes Absalom, Absalom! the only serious rival to Melville’s Moby-Dick as the great American novel. —Richard King

# 2 ALL THE KING’S MEN by ROBERT PENN WARREN (1946) (80 votes)

Robert Penn Warren’s book is an unqualified masterpiece. It is all-encompassing and eclipses everything else on the list. One could make a reasonable case for its being the greatest American novel ever written. Seemingly nothing escapes its scope or ambition. —Ben George

All the King’s Men is a terribly ambitious and sometimes maddening novel, five or six novels crammed into one. It is cumbersome, perhaps, but it is a generative novel, a novel that is so innovative it changed the novels that followed, or made them possible. Descendents of All the King’s Men are various—from popular political novels to, oddly, road novels like Kerouac’s (there is a whole Beat sequence in Warren’s book—a trip to California). And, in the weary voice of Jack Burden, we hear the slow, cosmic disappointment of Binx Bolling, who came after. —Moira Crone

# 3 THE SOUND AND THE FURY by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1929) (64 votes)

This stylized and ultra-literary concoction still manages to engage us. We work our way through four hundred pages of convoluted, sometimes impenetrable prose—and the members of the Compson family appear before us in all their appalling egoism, fear, greed, innocence, and hubris. Reading, you almost forget that this is fiction—the characters are so fully realized. As the final dissolution of the family comes to pass, you want to avert your eyes but you keep turning the pages—in fear and trembling. An unbearable tragedy, yet simultaneously a joy—as we recognize that the thirty-year-old, small-town author has gone the limit, investing his mind, soul, passion, psyche, everything, in the novel’s creation. —William Caverlee

# 4 THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by MARK TWAIN (1885) (58 votes)

If you can discern anything about the greatness of a book by how often someone has either banned it or tried to have it banned, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn surely must be the greatest Southern novel of all time. Critics can say what they want about the book’s ending, but I challenge anyone to come up with an American writer who was braver, funnier, and more eerily perceptive than Mark Twain. —Bronwen Dickey

Huck, the battered child, and Jim, the runaway slave, are capable of feeling painful sympathy, for each other and for others. Others aren’t so burdened. Huck wishes he weren’t. Others, including the King, the Duke of Bilgewater, Tom Sawyer, a justly popular undertaker, and the River itself, can put on a show. It’s the funniest great book there is. —Roy Blount, Jr.

# 5 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by HARPER LEE (1960) (57 votes)

Okay, this is kind of like voting for Albert Pujols as best hitter—really predictable. But who doesn’t love this novel for its descriptions, its drama and humor, its characters that are now ingrained in the American psyche, and its explorations not only of race in the South but also of femininity and class? Even the questions that hover around the book (why did Harper Lee not write another? just what was Truman Capote’s role?) have become part of its lure. —Hope Coulter

Even though it simplifies race relations in the South, and even though Atticus really could have done more to save an innocent man’s life, almost every American remembers reading this book as a watershed moment. —Michael Kreyling

# 6 THE MOVIEGOER by WALKER PERCY (1961) (55 votes)

In Percy’s classic tale of love and longing in New Orleans, Binx Bolling woos his secretary, falls for his cousin, and muses lyrically on the nature of the search. This book has kept me company in China, Slovenia, Argentina. When I’m going to be away from home for any extended period of time, The Moviegoer is as essential a part of my travel kit as my toothbrush. I can open it to any page and instantly feel calmed. “To become aware of the possibility of a search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” —Michelle Richmond

If a better book than The Moviegoer has been written, I’ll cut off my little toe. —Ada Liana Bidiuc

# 7 AS I LAY DYING by WILLIAM FAULKNER (1930) (52 votes)

I once heard a poet say she never reads novels. When asked why, she said, “Because I always get about twenty pages in and then I realize, hmm, THIS isn’t As I Lay Dying.” In comparison, everything else is a bit of a disappointment. —Keith Lee Morris

# 8 INVISIBLE MAN by RALPH ELLISON (1952) (47 votes)

Write a novel this good and this significant that doesn’t die in the pursuit of significance but, instead, comes alive. Go on. We’ll wait. —Wyatt Mason

# 9 WISE BLOOD by FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1952) (44 votes)

Flannery O’Connor’s seriously dark comedy Wise Blood is among the finest American novels squarely about religion—awash with street preachers, yearning rustics, fake and genuine self-inflicted blindness, roaming pigs, a stolen mummy pressed into service as a faux Holy Child, descriptions of an allegorical sky no one ever seems to see, a soul-consuming gorilla costume, and a battered black Essex automobile as pregnant with meaning as the Pequod in Moby-Dick. It is also a brilliant critique of what O’Connor called the “American tendency to address a problem by changing its appearance.” —Mark Winegardner

Didn’t she turn over a rock with this one? And she didn’t flinch one bit. Renders the surreal believable. —Melissa Delbridge

# 10 THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1937) (41 votes)

Janie springs to life from the pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and her half-understood yearning, her wordless understanding, grabs our hearts. Zora Neale Hurston, through her Janie—who, pondering under a pear tree, begins to understand what it means to try to live a fulfilled life—speaks for some of us in words, desires, and thoughts that we did not know could be articulated. She not only lives our experience, she makes it sing. —Jesmyn Ward

11. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers (32 votes) “Almost a laboratory for examining the effects of alienation characteristic of the wider America.” —Thomas Bonner, Jr.

12. A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole (27) “Just to know that Ignatius J. Reilly is out there somewhere, sucking the jelly out of a dozen jelly doughnuts or screaming insults at a downtown movie screen, has saved me untold psychiatrist’s bills.” —William Caverlee

13. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner (26)

14. A DEATH IN THE FAMILY by James Agee (25)

15. LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL by Thomas Wolfe (24)

16. BELOVED by Toni Morrison (22) “Though Morrison is an Ohioan and the bulk of BELOVED takes place across the river Eliza Harris crossed so memorably in UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, the novel is ‘Southern’ in that it is in profound conversation not only with UNCLE TOM’S CABIN but also Faulkner’s GO DOWN, MOSES, ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, and THE UNVANQUISHED (among others). Morrison makes authentic the voice of the slave…. Besides, as Henry Louis Gates has said of African Americans, no matter where they were born, ‘we are all Southerners’.” —Diane Roberts

17. THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin (21)

18. THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker (18)

19. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright (16)

Tied for #20 with 15 votes each

THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER by Eudora Welty

SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy “Oprah loved THE ROAD, and everybody loved his cowboy books, but this one—a Knoxville Ulysses—is McCarthy at his best.” —John Grammer

Tied for #21 with 14 votes each GO DOWN, MOSES by William Faulkner

GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell

22. THE GOLDEN APPLES by Eudora Welty (13)

Tied for #23 with 12 votes each CANE by Jean Toomer “Full of blood-burning moons and unvarnished truths, beguiling and stark.” —Catherine Clinton

THE KNOWN WORLD by Edward P. Jones

Tied for #24 with 11 votes each BLOOD MERIDIAN: OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST by Cormac McCarthy

DELIVERANCE by James Dickey

THE LAST GENTLEMAN by Walker Percy

A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Ernest J. Gaines

Tied for #25 with 10 votes each BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron “What a brave act it was to step into Mr. Turner’s skin and show us something new about the way slavery perverted faith, loyalty, and courage.” —Melissa Delbridge

[a fool in paradise]

Will other FReepers identify which books would be considered “Southern Apologetics” so i may avoid them.

I thought that American literature was harsh on Southern people and then I got a taste of Canadian literature that held the same view of all Americans.

Read in college.

[LonePalm]

It is only 19 pages but how about H. L. Mencken's "Sahara of the Bozart?"

It was credited with single-handedly reviving the arts in the South after the civil war.

"You can't go home again" by Thomas Wolfe.

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Picky.

[slumber1]

As much as I liked Lonesome Dove (and I did read the novel) The Last Picture Show is as good as To Kill A Mockingbird or anything by Faulkner.

Of course I am a Texas boy so I’m a bit biased in favor of novels set in Texas. Hud - by McMurtry is pretty darn good too

[Sudetenland]

I guess that’s why they make vanilla and chocolate ice cream...people’s tastes vary.

[Migraine]

Robert Ruark -- The Old Man and the Boy

James Dickey -- Deliverance made the list. That's good.

[Borges]

But in matters of pure fact, the story in TSATF is a genunine tragedy that encompasses many decades of Southern history. I hope you’ll give the book another chance one day. Not all of it is SOC.

[SoDak]

I agree, I’ve started that book many times and it just makes me hostile reading it. I threw my copy in the dumpster, lest anyone else happen upon it, and be vexed. Same goes for Ulysses, which is only good as a table-leveller.

[T Minus Four]

One of the most important Southern works of all time inexplicably failed to make the list!

[Tijeras_Slim]

Robert Ruark -- The Old Man and the Boy

A+!

[Borges]

Just get past the first section. It’s told from the point of view of a mentally retarded man who has no sense of time. Ulysses is great.

[Little Bill]

30/40 Krag if I remember correctly, had one when I was a kid, smooth action, very actuate.

[JoeProBono]

[Wallace T.]

The question arises as to whether Texas writers are Southern writers. Of course, Texas was predominantly settled by Southerners and is culturally Southern, but the physical environment of the Lone Star State is very different from the older Southern states. West of Fort Worth and Austin lie the vast Great Plains, a very different landscape than the rest of the Confederacy. The Texas economy did not enter a 80-90 year slump as did the rest of the South following Appomattox. Cattle and oil, along with vast areas open to homesteading, led to a far stronger economy and great population growth from 1870 until 1930, even as the older South stagnated. Additionally, Texas was for the most part not a battleground between 1861 and 1865, and Union invasions were easily repelled. Generals like Sherman and Sheridan did not devastate the state, unlike Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. You also cannot discount the Central European and Hispanic influences, which, though mostly confined to Central and South Texas, are not found elsewhere in the South.

As a result, the effect of the Lost Cause and the pessimism engendered by decades of a stagnant economy were not factors in the Texas collective conscience, as they were in the pre-World War II South. Thus, the state's fiction writers did not reflect the same experience as those in the older South. Texas literature is related to Southern literature, but represents at least a subcategory, if not a separate one.

[slumber1]

Agreed - and I kinda took that into consideration when perusing the list which seems to be deep south oriented.

As always Texas stands apart from the rest

[winstonwolf33]