Carolinas, Georgia & South Trips (Lonely Planet, 1st Edition) - Alex Leviton [31]
From Savannah, Carson McCullers fans may want to take I-16 to Hwy 25 to I-20 to Columbia, Georgia. McCullers, Tennessee Williams’ favorite protégé, was born here and her home served as inspiration for the mill town depicted in her first and greatest novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. It’s a beautifully sad, yet ultimately hopeful, tome centered on an enlightened deaf mute and his various friends and confidantes (including an adolescent girl, an African-American doctor, a business owner and a hard-drinking communist) during the Great Depression. Or you can bypass Columbia, and stay on I-16 to Hwy 441 which will take you toward Flannery O’Connor’s home, Andalusia. O’Connor was raised on this farm property when her family moved from Savannah. After attending the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, she returned here to write. Her acclaimed short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find, was published in 1955. Like her father, she died of lupus. She was just 39. Before she passed she published two novels and two short story collections. She won the National Book Award for her compilation, The Complete Stories, published posthumously.
From here you’ll head west into Alabama on Hwy 80 and I-85. At Montgomery, head south on I-65 to Hwy 84 and Monroeville, a small Alabama town that gave us both Truman Capote, the progenitor of the non-fiction novel, and his childhood friend, Harper Lee of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. To Kill a Mockingbird, written in the Southern Gothic style, takes aim at the institutional racism of the South. It was a runaway hit, and earned Lee the 1961 Pulitzer Prize. It takes place in the fictional town of Maycomb, a mirror image of Monroeville. The plot revolves around the trial of a young black man who is wrongfully accused of raping a white woman during the Great Depression. It’s narrated by six-year-old Scout Finch, whose dad, Atticus, risks his and his family’s safety to defend his railroaded client. If you’ve never read it, this book is an absolute must! Each May, curtains rise on a production of To Kill A Mockingbird at the Old Courthouse Museum, which also has permanent exhibits on both Lee and her pal, Capote.
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SOUTHERN GOTHIC EXPOSED
Gothic literature was born in England, when writers took on the moral blindness of the medieval era through supernatural tales. Southern writers, for the most part, muted the supernatural in their work. Instead they plumbed the characters and communities damaged by a regional history of Christian supremacy, frosted with an “everything-is-just-fine-as-it-is“ veneer. Writers knew that such social tension led to years of brutality, as well as economic and moral bankruptcy, because they lived it. Which makes their stories more dramatic and poignant.
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When the curtain drops, find Hwy 45 north and take the long drive to Hwy 6 and Oxford, Mississippi. Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner may be long dead, but he still owns this town. It’s home to the lovely University of Mississippi, and has a certain literary panache to it. Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s fine, 33-acre estate, nurtured many novels, but required him to slum in Hollywood as a studio-owned screenwriter in order to pay it off. Check out the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink to glimpse a less than sympathetic picture of Faulkner’s Hollywood days. Ninety-percent of Rowan Oak’s original furnishings