“I wonder though, concerning regional bigotry, would she have been received differently if she hailed instead from, say, Oxford, Mississippi?”
I don’t think it would have mattered. Mississippian John Grisham is viewed by the East Coast literati with utter contempt. Actually, not even contempt — just snickering. A lawyer! From Mississippi! What law school did you say he went to? Hilarious!
Faulkner’s acceptance was hard-won and grudging in academia. They can ignore his racist-redneck-Southerness because he’s looked on not so much as a Southerner but as a member of the Fraternity of Drunk Mad-as-a-Hatter writers. Hemingway’s brother if you will. And they looooooooove Hemingway. And drunks.
Other Southern women writers — McCullers, Welty — are safe from the wrath of the East Coast syndicate because they simply don’t sell like Harper Lee and are not such a threat to their cultural hegemony. Nobody else comes close to the numbers she sells every year.
P.S. Hemingway also wrote one good novel in his lifetime, though he kept trying. Nobody ever suggests he didn’t write “The Sun Also Rises.”
A lot of people hold John Grisham in contempt. And I am one of them. And it has nothing to do with where he is from (I’m a Louisiana boy, and had kin in Mississippi before they died of old age).
No, my gripe against Grisham is that he simply lacks the talent to write well, but he thinks of himself as a literary master. Many successful authors do not write well, but many of them acknowledge it and don’t hold themselves out to be the second coming of Mark Twain or Charles Dickens.
As far as contemporary fiction writers, Nelson Demille is light years superior to John Grisham.
John Grisham is to writing talent as Roseanne Barr is to singing talent.