On Southern lit:
Interestingly, the most successful regional American literature is the product of the part of our country with the most stifling, tradition-fraught culture...The South was also the place it was hardest to pretend that evil was all somebody else's doing...White Southerners knew they were implicated in what's been called America's original sin, the great contradiction at the heart of America's foundation - chattel slavery, justified on the basis of race.
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If the theme of Faulkner's fiction is that you can never really get a fresh start, the theme of Flannery O'Connor's is that you can - but only at an enormous price...O'Connor is bent on showing us the cost of salvation, which is the only real fresh start available to us. The further we get from understanding original sin, that most essential truth about human nature, the more violent the intervention of grace - and the literature, for that matter - has to be, to get our attention.
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