The Top 25 Great Southern Books

Nothing lets you know that you live in the South like these long, hot, humid summer days, but if you really want to get in the summer mood, you should add a dash of Southern Literature.
While a great number of Southern books have been written over the years, you’ll be hard pressed to find more than a handful of “best-of” lists for great Southern books. One outstanding exception to this is a great best-of list that I ran across several years ago. Called “A Southern List: 125 Great Southern Books,” this list was put together several years ago by the James Agee Film Project while they were working on the award-winning documentary series, “Tell About The South: Voices in Black and White.” The list of great Southern books was compiled after a poll of book editors, publishers, scholars and reviewers. They were each asked “which of the thousands of Southern prose works published in during the past century should be considered ‘the most remarkable works of modern Southern Literature.’”
The list is broken down into two parts – The Top 25 Great Southern Books and The Next 100 Great Southern Books. Tonight, I give you the top 25.
1. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
2. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee
3. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (pictured above)
4. The Mind of the South by Wilbur Cash
5. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
7. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
8. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
9. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
10. Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy
11. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
12. The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty
13. The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote
14. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
15. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
16. Black Boy by Richard Wright
17. Cane by Jean Toomer
18. Native Son by Richard Wright
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
21. Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
22. The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy
23. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
24. The Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter
25. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines
Visit the blog tomorrow, and I’ll start in on The Next 100 Great Southern Books, which are arranged alphabetically by author. Of the books mentioned above, how many have you read? Which is your favorite and which would you recommend? Let us know in the comments section below.