Page "Southern literature" Paragraph 16

In the 1920s and 1930s, a renaissance in Southern literature began with the appearance of writers such as William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, and Tennessee Williams, among others.

Because of the distance the Southern Renaissance authors had from the American Civil War and slavery, they were more objective in their writings about the South.

During the 1920s, Southern poetry thrived under the Vanderbilt " Fugitives ".

In nonfiction, H. L.

Mencken's popularity increased nationwide as he shocked and astounded readers with his satiric writing highlighting the inability of the South to produce anything of cultural value.

In reaction to Mencken's essay, " The Sahara of the Bozart ," the Southern Agrarians ( also based mostly around Vanderbilt ) called for a return to the South's agrarian past and bemoaned the rise of Southern industrialism and urbanization.

They noted that creativity and industrialism weren't compatible and desired the return to a lifestyle that would afford the Southerner leisure ( a quality the Agrarians most felt conducive to creativity ).

Writers like Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, also brought new techniques such as stream of consciousness and complex narrative techniques to their writings.

For instance, his novel As I Lay Dying is told by changing narrators ranging from the deceased Addie to her young son.