South Toward Home, Margaret Eby
South Toward Home, Margaret Eby
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South Toward Home
Travels in Southern Literature

Author: Margaret Eby

Narrator: Susan Bennett

Unabridged: 6 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/08/2015


Synopsis

A literary travelogue into the heart of classic Southern literature. What is it about the South that has inspired so much of America's greatest literature? And why, when we think of Flannery O'Connor or William Faulkner or Harper Lee, do we think of them not just as writers, but as Southern writers? In South Toward Home, Margaret Eby-herself a Southerner-travels through the South in search of answers to these questions, visiting the hometowns and stomping grounds of some of our most beloved authors. From Mississippi (William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright) to Alabama (Harper Lee, Truman Capote) to Georgia (Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews) and beyond, Eby looks deeply at the places that these authors lived in and wrote about. South Toward Home reveals how these authors took the people and places they knew best and transmuted them into lasting literature. Side by side with Eby, we meet the man who feeds the peacocks at Andalusia, the Georgia farm where Flannery O'Connor wrote her most powerful stories; we peek into William Faulkner's liquor cabinet to better understand the man who claimed civilization began with distillation and the "postage stamp of native soil" that inspired him; and we go in search of one of New Orleans's iconic hot dog vendors, a job held by Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. From the library that showed Richard Wright that there was a way out to the courtroom at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird, Eby grapples with a land fraught with history and mythology, for, as Eudora Welty wrote, "One place understood helps us understand all places better." Combining biographical detail with expert criticism, Eby delivers a rich and evocative tribute to the literary South.

About Margaret Eby

Margaret Eby is the author of two books, including South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature. She is deputy food editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a former senior editor at Food & Wine, MyRecipes, and Extra Crispy. She has written for the New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She graduated from Barnard College and completed an MA at New York University. She also completed a certificate program at the International Culinary Center in 2019.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sue on March 17, 2024

South Toward Home is well described by its subtitle: Travels in Southern Literature. In reading this book we not only move geographically through four states in the American south (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana), we also move through American southern literary history meeting some of t......more

Goodreads review by Charlene on June 10, 2023

Very good. Just stumbled across this one when looking for an audiobook on Libby and was very pleased. Author has taken 5 or 6 places which are very closely identified with authors (Jackson, MS =Eudora Welty and Richard Wright, Oxford, MS = Faulkner and Larry Brown) and described how these places bot......more