Southern Writing

My wife and children gave me Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman for some occasion in the last few years since it was released. To be honest I can't remember if it was Father's Day, Christmas, or birthday. Either way they know my love language is books, so they purchased it for me. Earlier this year I reread Lee's classic, To Kill A Mockingbird in anticipation of reading Go Set A Watchman. I recall others commenting that they didn't like Atticus Finch in the second book or something else about the book that disillusioned them surrounding the mystique of Harper Lee or the legendary book she was known for nearly all her life. Though I enjoyed To Kill A Mockingbird more, I really liked Go Set A Watchman. 

I liked it for the same reason I like most southern writing, particularly southern fiction. In the pages of Flannery O' Connor, Harper Lee, Walker Percy, Will Campbell, Ferrol Sams,  Pat Conroy, and others one is confronted with the hypocrisy of the south in all its glory. One is forced to wrestle not just ideologically but personally with issues of rich and poor, black and white, educated and uneducated. One reads the characters in these pieces of literature and finds glimpses of self shining through. Questions of ideals, racism, sexism, and even theological tensions. Many of the famed southern authors have faith or at least religion somewhere in his or her identity which manifests itself in the ink of the page. I read these authors because I find traces of myself in each book. Things about me that I like, things I don't like. Things I have changed, things I want to change. Ultimately each author and each of the books by them I have read push me to examine who I am as a person, a Christian, a husband, a father, and a friend...because of this I will keep reading.