If something great should be stipulated about the Southerners it should include their great story telling manner. That they are great traditionalists in literature is an undisputed fact. Even though they are great orally as story tellers it must be said that some of the greatest writers are southerners.

Southern literature when looking at it basically it is writing about the South however the south could be very far flung like Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee Kentucky and Maryland. Southern writing when you want to explain it also include a southerner writing on a subject that has nothing to do with the south and completely a different topic. To use a great example we use the Flowering Judas which plays of in Mexico, yet written by the outstanding southern author Katherine Anne Porter.

When you look at southern literature historically you will find that it has a distinctive theme and authors too traditionally. When compared to the northeast you find that the south have never been settled by puritans who wanted a conformed theocracy, but by diverse amounts of individuals living in the south who all have the same ideal and seeing religious, economic hope for a great future of the people of the south.

Puritans regarded themselves and nature as sinful since corrupted by original sin, while southern story tellers like William Byrd, Robert Beverley, and John Smith saw an alluring beauty and fertility in the south and remained consistent in the writings of a clean slate. During the late eighteen century with slavery important to southern economy many of its people were depicted as misguided, ignorant, irreligious, cruel, despotic and lazy too by the European visitors and northerners too. Of course southerners responded and it was done in three different manners. They first off all retreated from vexing particularities of place and time in poetry for example works off Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Holly Chivers and Philip Pendleton Cooke.

When looking at current southern literature people like to call up authors from the southern renaissance like Carolyn Gordon, Allen Tate, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and more. During the southern renaissance writers addresses legacies of racism, and burdens of the past from a land that suffered economic and military defeat without shame or guilt. Southern literature thrived after the renaissance more than ever before with outstanding writers including Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, Elizabeth Spencer, Ellen Douglas, Ernest Gaines, James Dickey and many more.