South Toward Home

May 11, 2015
In this literary tour of the American South, Eby focuses on the places and things central to Southern writers: meditating on Eudora Welty’s garden, peeking into William Faulkner’s liquor cabinet, and spending an afternoon with Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks (or their replacements—O’Connor’s actual peacocks are long gone), among other stops. Eby travels to Oxford, Miss.; Natchez, Miss.; Milledgeville, Ga.; New Orleans; and several other stops on the tourist circuit of preserved homes, mini-museums, and bookish gift shops. Some writers tower over the communities they immortalized, while others are barely recognized or mentioned. Jackson, Miss., for instance, clearly prefers the easy sainthood of Welty to Richard Wright’s more complex legacy. Eby writes thoughtfully about each author’s books—especially John Kennedy Toole’s beloved A Confederacy of Dunces—and, in a section about Harper Lee’s reclusiveness, insightfully reflects on the meaning of and potential downsides to literary fandom. She occasionally falls back on flattering, idyllic tributes to her favorite authors. Nonetheless, these essays form a delightful love letter to the South and serve as an apt reminder that the South is no literary backwater, but a world of letters all its own. Agent: Brandi Bowles, Foundry Literary + Media.

June 1, 2015

Eby, who has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times, and who is originally from Birmingham, AL, has turned her love for Southern literature and the artifacts in the homes of Southern writers into a travelog of the places Southern writers lived and worked. The author visits William Faulkner's liquor cabinet and comments on Eudora Welty's mass of papers and love for gardening, Harper Lee and Truman Capote's courtrooms, and other areas that sparked the author's imagination or offered a quiet place to meditate. The resulting book is a gentle reminder of the many styles of writing labeled as "Southern." VERDICT Eby's collection provides a fine introduction to writers and their homes and will be appreciated by readers of older literature (the book ends with Barry Hannah and Larry Brown).--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2015
This sweetly personal yet embracingly informative book is a result of the author's focused travel through the American South, a trip she calls a pilgrimage to the places that a group of Southern writers described in their fiction. Before sharing rich details about her visits, Eby introduces the issues that she sees as intrinsic in attempting to isolate and define southern literature. From observing that a certain flavor exists in the literature of the American Southactually, there's a ferocity about it she then insists that the 10 writers she is impressed by and follows here are outstanding in their ability to convey to nonsoutherners the nature of the portion of the South with which they were (or are) personally familiar. Eby concludes that what makes a Southern writer a Southern writer is not just the circumstances of his or her birth but a fierce attachment to a particular place, and a commitment to exploring its limits in his or her work. The 10 writers she features all have strong appeal to a wide range of readers of American literature. The place of honorthe first writer she discussesis deservedly given to Eudora Welty, one of the most highly regarded fiction writers in the long, golden pageant of southern literature. Basic familiarity with Welty informs any reader that Jackson, Mississippi, was where she was deeply rooted and lay at the heart of her fiction, her reputation resting primarily on her incomparable short stories. Eby is obviously enchanted by Welty's graceful yet sharp-edged prose, which captured the local culture around her as with a butterfly net. Richard Wright, author of Native Son, also grew up in Jackson, and Eby sensitively paints the difference between the white and black sides of Jackson life that generated each writer's fiction. Of course, no visit to southern literature can be complete without a stop in Oxford, Mississippi, to survey the little postage stamp of soil that Faulkner tilled time and again for his very distinctive fiction, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, John Kennedy Toole, Barry Hannah, and Larry Brown round out the list of distinctively southern writers Eby brings into her defining discussions, enticing us to enjoy their work either for the first time or once again.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2015
Seeking the heart of Southern writing. Essayist and journalist Eby (Rock and Roll Baby Names: Over 2,000 Music-Inspired Names, from Alison to Ziggy, 2012) pays homage to 10 Southern writers in this illuminating journey to the homes, towns, and landscapes that nurtured them. Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, the author came to understand her identity as a Southerner by reading Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, and, of course, William Faulkner. Besides these usual suspects, she includes the "harsh and haunting" Harry Crews, memoirist Richard Wright, Lee's irascible friend Truman Capote, and fiction writers Barry Hannah, John Kennedy Toole, and Larry Brown. Eby embarked on this odyssey, she writes, "to see the places they had lived in and written about, to breathe the same air, to hear the same accents and meet the same people." Many homes have been preserved for visitors. Being in Welty's, Eby reports, feels "like dropping into one of her stories." At O'Connor's Andalusia Farm in Milledgevile, Eby imagined her surrounded by her peacocks, writing in a "small, almost monastic" room with a single bed and plain wooden desk. Both Welty and O'Connor felt cowed by Faulkner's reputation. He was like "a big mountain, something majestic," Welty said. "I keep clear of Faulkner so my own little boat won't get swamped," O'Connor told a friend. Visiting Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi, Eby particularly noted his bookshelves, "custom made to store his shotgun shells along the sides," and his liquor cabinet, replete with bottles of whiskey. She also traveled to Monroeville, a town that finds myriad ways to celebrate Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. She traces Crews' painful childhood in Bacon County, Georgia, and sensitively evokes Toole's New Orleans as well as his posthumous novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. Eby brings fine sensibility to her readings of all her subjects' works and, in polished prose, offers a fresh look at their lives and literary legacies.

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