Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature

Something about the South has inspired the imaginations of an extraordinary number of America's best storytellers - and greatest writers. That quality may be a rich, unequivocal sense of place, a living connection with the past, or the contradictions and passions that endow this region with awesome tragedy. The stories in this superb collection of modern Southern writing are about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood - in other words, about growing up in the South. An excerpt from Maya Angelou's autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, describing her 1940 grade school graduation is a story of discrimination and the strengths blacks gained as they united as a community to fight prejudice. Flannery O'Conner's "Everything That Rises Must Converge,"set in a South that remains segregated even after segregation is declared illegal, is the story of a white college student who chastises his mother for her prejudice against blacks. But black, white, aristocrat, or sharecropper, each of these 24 authors is unmistakably Southern... and their writing, indisputably wonderful.