From the recognition of Alabama as a state in 1819 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, regional literature in this era contained strong themes of nationalismand discussions of race centered around slavery and the political unrest in the lead-up to the Civil War. Notable works from this period include a history of the state by Albert J Pickett, epic poetry and essays by Alexander Beaufort Meek, including one about the Creek leader Red Eagle; humorist stories of the pioneer era by Johnson J Hooper, and Caroline Lee Hentz.[citation needed]
Modern (late 19th to mid 20th century)
Displaying the conventions of Modernism found in literature throughout the Western world, literature in Alabama was also characterized by themes expressed in the South and other parts of the United States. These included issues of race, in response to disfranchisement of most blacks at the turn of the century, passage of Jim Crow laws in the late 19th century to mid-20th century, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Authors also addressed issues of gender and war, in response to the First and Second World Wars, and the Vietnam War.
Fiction
Harper Lee receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W Bush
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is widely recognized as the most influential fictional work from Alabama. It continues to be one of the most popular novels in the English language, and has been widely translated.[1] The novel follows the young Scout Finch, a girl being raised with her brother by their widowed father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer in a small town. The children are often treated as outsiders, leading to them to bond with others on the margin, such as neighbor Boo Radley. The central conflict of the novel is when Atticus defends a black man accused of rape of a white woman.[1]
Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1926.[1] She was likely influenced by the larger events of this period, but critics believe that material from three specific cases from her youth can be seen in her work. Firstly, the Scottsboro Boys case of 1931 to 1937 in northern Alabama involved eight young black men unjustly accused of rape of a white woman,[1] a 1933 criminal case in Monroeville with significant parallels to the case described in To Kill A Mockingbird,[1] and the confrontation between her father, Amasa Coleman Lee (believed to have inspired the character Atticus), and members of the Ku Klux Klan outside their house in 1934.[1]To Kill a Mockingbird spent 98 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list,[1] and in 1961, Lee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.[1] A film adaptation of the same name premiered in 1962 and won three Academy Awards.[1]Go Set a Watchman, a second novel that cast a different perspective on these events, was published in 2015; Lee had had many issues with her health.
The Keepers of the House (1964), by Shirley Ann Grau, is a novel about Abigail Howland, the head of a family who is ostracized when it is revealed that her grandfather lived for 30 years with a Black mistress and raised three mixed-race children with her.[4][5] In response to Grau’s writings on interracial marriage, members of the Ku Klux Klan attempted to intimidate her by burning a cross in front of her house.[6]The Keepers of the House won a Pulitzer Prize in 1965.[4][6]
Joe David Brown’s novels were well known for drawing on his life, including his childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, experience as a journalist, and service in World War II.[7] His most famous work is the novel, Addie Pray (1971), which follows 11-year-old Addie and Long Boy, the man who might be her father. They travel as two con artists in the South.[8] The novel was adapted as the film Paper Moon, and Tatum O'Neal as Addie became the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award.[7] His novel, Stars in My Crown (1947), was adapted into a film of the same name in 1949. Brown based it on his grandfather.[7] Brown also published The Freeholder in 1949, Kings Go Forth in 1956, and Glimpse of a Stranger in 1968.[7]
South To A Very Old Place (1971), was written by Albert Murray, who grew up in Mobile, Alabama. South To A Very Old Place follows the personal pilgrimage of a Black intellectual man and contains highly political discussions of race and its relationship with the United States.[9][10]
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Robert R. McCammon is best known for his horror novels and collection of short stories, published between 1978 and 1990. These include Baal, Bethany’s Sin, the Night Boat, They Thirst, Mystery Walk, Usher’s Passing, Swan Song, Stinger, The Wolf’s Hour, Blue World, and Mine.[11] McCammon also published a Boy’s Life, a “sentimental novel in which the good end up happy and the bad unhappy in the young protagonist’s fictional Alabama hometown”.[11]
Forrest Gump (1986) is a novel by Winston Groom. He wrote other novels, including Shrouds of Glory and Patriotic Fire, and several non-fiction works, including biographies of multiple persons in one volume. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for his nonfiction work, Conversations with the Enemy.[12] Groom grew up in Mobile, attended the University of Alabama, and served as a second lieutenant in Vietnam in 1965.[12]
Forrest Gump was adapted for film, with a screenplay written by Eric Roth; it was released in 1994 starring Tom Hanks. It grossed more than $670 million globally at the box office and won six Oscars, in addition to numerous other awards.[12] In both forms, the story follows Forrest Gump, an optimistic Alabama man with a below average IQ, throughout his life. He is involved in many significant events in US history, including the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis.
Biography
Martin Luther King Jr, civil rights activist
The blind and deaf Helen Keller’s inspirational story is told in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, published in 1903.[13] Recounting her early life in Alabama, the autobiography features some of the most prominent figures in her life, including learning to communicate with Anne Sullivan.[13][14]
Published in 1998, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr, recounts the life of one of the most notable figures in the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr, including his childhood in segregated Alabama. He describes his faith, family, and views on other notable figures of the time, including presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and other civil rights activists, such as Malcolm X.[15]
In her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1999), written with Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks tells of being an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. She became known for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated city bus in Montgomery in 1955 and sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a major campaign in the Movement.[16][17] Parks also discusses her years afterward as a civil rights activist as well.
Contemporary (mid 20th century to present day)
Fiction
Mary Ward Brown, recognized as “one of contemporary Southern fiction’s most important writers”,[18] is known for her short story collections, Tongues of Flame and It Wasn’t All Dancing, that discuss issues of race, class, gender and age. Tongues of Flame, the 1986 collection that includes Good-Bye, Cliff, Let Him Live, Disturber of the Peace, and Fruit of the Season, was awarded the Pen/ Hemingway Award, the Lillian Smith Award, and the Alabama Library Association Award. Following the publication of It Wasn’t All Dancing, Brown also won the Harper Lee Award and the Hillsdale Award for Fiction.
Fannie Flagg’s much beloved Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe was published in 1987. Set in the 1930s, the novel discusses themes of friendship and loyalty through the account of the friendship between the lonely Cleo Threadgoode and the neurotic and fearful Evelyn Couch.[19] The film adaptation, Fried Green Tomatoes, was released in 1991, the script for which Flagg won the Scripters Award and was nominated for an Academy Award and the Writers Guild of America award.[20] Flagg also authored Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! and A Redbird Christmas.
Anne George’s 1996 novel, Murder On A Girls Night Out, is about a schoolteacher from Alabama, her sister, and the murder investigation that they get drawn into, which is characterized by humorous details.[21]
Set in Birmingham in 1963, Sena Jeter Naslund’s 2001 novel, Four Spirits, centers around Stella, a white middle-class young woman who is haunted by the deaths of her family when she was a child.[22] She is overwhelmed by the racially inspired violence in Birmingham, of whites against blacks, including the bombing of a church that year that results in the deaths of four African-American girls. She and a friend become involved in civil rights by working for a night school and teaching black students.[22]
The cast of the Looking for Alaska miniseries and author John Green
John Green’s debut novel, published in 2005, Looking for Alaska, is a young adult novel that explores a modern and youthful take on love, loss, and self-discovery. The narrator is Miles, who attends a Birmingham boarding school, and he recount his friendships with his roommate, the Colonel, and Alaska.[23] He describes their struggles as young people in the 21st century American South. Looking for Alaska won the Michael L. Printz Award and the Teen’s Top 10 Award,[24] among others. It was adapted as a TV drama miniseries of the same title in 2019, starring Kristine Froseth and Charlie Plummer.
Characterized by themes of religion and interracial love, Joshilyn Jackson’s 2005 novel, Gods in Alabama, centers around Arlene Fleet, who makes three promises to God: that she won’t have sex outside of marriage, tell a lie, or ever come back to Possett, Alabama, with one condition.[25][26] When this isn’t met, Arlene returns to her hometown with her Black fiance, determined to lie to her family about the nature of their relationship.[26] Jackson returned to Alabama as a setting in her 2017 novel, The Almost Sisters, in which Leia Briggs, pregnant with a biracial baby to a man she doesn’t know, arrives in her grandmother’s town to confront the older woman's secret dementia and her stepsister’s failing marriage.[27]
Framed by Native American lore and a love of the natural world, Mary Saums’s mystery novel, Thistle and Twigg (2007), is set in a sleepy Alabama town. New friends Jane Thistle and Phoebe Twigg discover a corpse on Jane’s eccentric neighbor’s property and uncover the conspiracy surrounding it.[28]
Ellen Feldman in her novel, Scottsboro(2008), explores the infamous the Scottsboro Boys case as fiction, through the lens of journalist Alice Whittier.[29] Accused of raping two white women, eight young black men are convicted and sentenced to death in 1931. Alice reports on their various trials and appeals until their case was acquitted by the Supreme Court. She interviews the defendants, and other participants, including Ruby, one of the plaintiff women.[29]
In a coming of age story of brotherhood and first love, What They Always Tell Us (2008), Martin Wilson presents his novel from the alternating perspectives of two brothers in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.[30][31] Both feel out of place, and while one is desperate to leave, the other falls in love for the first time, and feels more attached to the place. But he knows his homosexuality will never be accepted there.[30][31]
In her Southern Gothic-style 2009 novel, The Splendor Falls, Rosemary Clement-Moore tells the story of a young ballerina who has just suffered an injury that has ended her career. She moves to live with her father’s family in Alabama. There, she finds a town filled with the supernatural and family secrets.[32][33]
Set in the fictional town of Darling, Alabama, Susan Wittig Albert’s 2010 novel, The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree, tells the story of a group of women in their Depression-era town filled with mysteries. The novel also contains Depression-era recipes and advice on stretching resources.[34][35]The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree is the first book in the larger series.
Marieke Nijkamp discusses highly contemporary issues relevant to a young American audience in her 2016 novel, This Is Where It Ends, which follows four teenagers minute- by- minute during a shooting in an Alabama high school.[37][38] Nijkamp was inspired to write the novel after a high-profile school shooting, and has said that "I wanted to understand the human stories of a school shooting. Writing This Is Where It Ends, and, specifically, writing it from four points of view, let me explore those stories."[37]
Set in 1920s Alabama, Virginia Reeve’s novel, Work Like Any Other (2016), explores the life of Roscoe Martin, who attempts to save a failing farm by running power lines to it. This installation ultimately results in the death of a man. Roscoe and his wife reflect on the past while he waits for parole from prison. His farm manager, Wilson, a Black man charged as Roscoe’s accomplice, was also convicted and received a harsher sentence.[39]
Set in the 30 years around the Civil War, Grace (2016) by Natashia Deón relates the haunting and heartbreaking story of a family of women who face extreme suffering under slavery. The novel follows young Naomi on a plantation in Faunsdale, Alabama, who kills her master after being told that her sister will be forced to take her mother’s place in a supervised rape by male slaves for the purpose of breeding.[40] Naomi escapes and takes refuge at a brothel. She escapes from there a few years later, pregnant by a white man. After she gives birth, she is killed by bounty hunters seeking the fugitive slave, but her daughter, Josey, survives.[40] Naomi narrates the story as a ghost, covering her life, death, and her daughter’s equally difficult life. Justice, mercy, and grace are the pillars of their story.[40]
In a story of race, and the power of music, James Kelman tells about a grieving father and son in his 2016 novel, Dirt Road. Leaving Scotland after the death of their family and traveling through Alabama to explore its music, Mudro learns how to live with his grief.[41]
The action mystery film Rage takes place entirely in Mobile.
Biography
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Rick Bragg, recounts his life in his 1991 memoir, All Over But The Shoutin’.[42] The memoir details his childhood in Alabama in significant poverty, facing issues with poor education, and his father’s trauma after the Korean War and turn to alcoholism. The matriarch of the Bragg family, Margret Marie Bragg, is presented as the hero-like figure that her sons depended on.[42] Bragg describes his work that culminated in his position at New York Times.[42]
John Lewis, author of the March trilogy
US Congressman John Lewis wrote a graphic autobiography with his aide, Andrew Aydin; it is illustrated by graphic artist Nate Powell. The March trilogy tells the life story of Lewis from his childhood in Alabama, to his role in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, and his later political career.[43] The books celebrate the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy, particularly in Selma, Alabama, where Lewis was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[43] The trilogy was written after Barack Obama was elected as US President. Lewis also discusses the resulting racist backlash, along with issues of police brutality and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. All three of the March books have the same dedication: to "the past and future children of the movement."[43]
Bryan Stevenson, an activist lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, tells his story in his 2014 memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.[44] The memoir centers around the case of his client, Walter McMillian, who was sentenced to death in the 1980s after being charged with the murder of a white woman in Monroeville, Alabama.[44] Stevenson discusses the racial injustices prevalent in the United States and flaws in the justice system, and states that “the true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned”.[45]
Anthony Ray Hinton, a convict sentenced to death, wrote a memoir in collaboration with Lara Love Hardin: The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (2018). Hinton, an innocent man, served 30 years on death row in Alabama. This memoir details his struggles in prison, including the deaths of his friends, and the power of imagination.[46]Bryan Stevenson and his team took on Hinton as a client, and won the case 15 years later. Hinton was released in 2015.[46]
Awards and events
The Alabama Library Association launched its "Alabama Author Awards" in 1957 for fiction, nonfiction and poetry; honorees have included Gail Godwin, Ann Waldron, and Kathryn Tucker Windham.[47] The Alabama Writers' Forum began in 1992.[48]
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in July 1960 and became instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature; a year after its release, it won the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.
Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Her second and final novel, Go Set a Watchman, was an earlier draft of Mockingbird, set at a later date, that was published in July 2015 as a sequel.
The Giver is a 1993 American young adult dystopian novel written by Lois Lowry, set in a society which at first appears to be utopian but is revealed to be dystopian as the story progresses.
Fannie Flagg is an American actress, comedian, and author. She is best known as a semi-regular panelist on the 1973–1982 versions of the game show Match Game and for the 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which she adapted into the script for the 1991 motion picture Fried Green Tomatoes. She was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay adaptation. Flagg lives in California and Alabama.
Rebecca Diane McWhorter is an American journalist, commentator, and author who has written extensively about race and the history of civil rights. She won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2002 for Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.
Joan Baehler Bauer is an American writer of young adult literature currently residing with her husband Evan Bauer in Brooklyn. Bauer was born in River Forest, Illinois. They are the parents of one daughter, Jean. Before becoming a famous author Joan spent years working for McGraw-Hill and the Chicago Tribune. She also did some work in advertising, marketing, and screenwriting.
Christopher Paul Curtis is an American children's book author. His first novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963, was published in 1995 and brought him immediate national recognition, receiving the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and the Newbery Honor Book Award in addition to numerous other awards. In 2000, he became the first person to win both the Newbery Medal and the Coretta Scott King Award—prizes received for his second novel Bud, Not Buddy—and the first African-American man to win the Newbery Medal. His novel The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 was made into a television film in 2013.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 is a historical-fiction novel by Christopher Paul Curtis. First published in 1995 by Delacorte Press, it was reprinted in 1997. It tells the story of the Watsons, a lower middle class African-American family living in Flint, Michigan in the early 1960s from the perspective of Kenny Watson, the middle child of three. The first part of the novel focuses on Kenny's struggles to make friends as a smart and thoughtful ten-year-old, then shifts in setting when his parents decide to deliver their oldest son, Byron, to live with his grandmother in Birmingham, Alabama. The family embarks on a road trip to the Deep South, and while visiting Alabama, they get caught up in a tragic historical event of the Civil Rights Movement.
Sonya Sones is an American poet and author. She has written seven young adult novels in verse and one novel in verse for adults. The American Library Association (ALA) has named her one of the most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century.
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018 to 2019. Her novel Another Brooklyn was shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. She won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2018. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.
Deborah Wiles is a children's book author. Her second novel, Each Little Bird That Sings, was a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Her documentary novel, Revolution, was a 2014 National Book Award finalist. Wiles received the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2004 and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award in 2005. Her fiction centers on home, family, kinship, and community, and often deals with historical events, social justice issues, and childhood reactions to those events, as well as everyday childhood moments and mysteries, most taken directly from her childhood. She often says, "I take my personal narrative and turn it into story."
Atticus Finch is a fictional character and the protagonist of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird. A preliminary version of the character also appears in the novel Go Set a Watchman, written in the mid-1950s but not published until 2015. Atticus is a lawyer and resident of the fictional Maycomb County, Alabama, and the father of Jeremy "Jem" Finch and Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. He represents the African-American man Tom Robinson in his trial where he is charged with rape of Mayella Ewell. Through his unwavering dedication to upholding justice and fighting for what is right, Atticus becomes an iconic symbol of moral integrity and justice. Lee based the character on her own father, Amasa Coleman Lee, an Alabama lawyer, who, like Atticus, represented black defendants in a highly publicized criminal trial. Book magazine's list of The 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900 names Finch as the seventh-best fictional character of 20th-century literature. In 2003, the American Film Institute voted Atticus Finch, as portrayed in an Academy Award–winning performance by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation, as the greatest hero of all American cinema. In the 2018 Broadway stage play adapted by Aaron Sorkin, Finch has been portrayed by various actors including Jeff Daniels, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnear, Rhys Ifans, and Richard Thomas.
Lola Mae Haynes Hendricks was corresponding secretary for Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights from 1956 to 1963. She assisted Wyatt Walker in planning the early portions of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's involvement in the 1963 Birmingham campaign during the Civil Rights Movement.
Pearl Cleage is an African-American playwright, essayist, novelist, poet and political activist. She is currently the Playwright in Residence at the Alliance Theatre and at the Just Us Theater Company. Cleage is a political activist. She tackles issues at the crux of racism and sexism, and is known for her feminist views, particularly regarding her identity as an African-American woman. Her works are highly anthologized and have been the subject of many scholarly analyses. Many of her works across several genres have earned both popular and critical acclaim. Her novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997) was a 1998 Oprah's Book Club selection.
One Crazy Summer is a historical fiction novel by American author Rita Williams-Garcia, published by Amistad in 2010. The novel is about Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern, three sisters, visiting their mother in Oakland, California, during the summer of 1968.
Go Set a Watchman is a novel by Harper Lee that was published in 2015 by HarperCollins (US) and Heinemann (UK). Written before her only other published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Go Set a Watchman was initially promoted as a sequel by its publishers. It is now accepted that it was a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, with many passages in that book being used again.
Claudia Durst Johnson is a literary scholar best known for her work on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, introducing the idea of the novel's gothicism and gothic satire. In the process of her research she befriended the author, Harper Lee. When the city of Chicago organized a One City One Book program in 2001 based on To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee was unavailable to speak, so Johnson was invited to Chicago to present the book to the city.
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian American novelist. Her work, most notably her 2016 debut novel Homegoing and her 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes of lineage, generational trauma, and Black and African identities. At the age of 26, Gyasi won the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" honors for 2016 and the 2017 American Book Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020. As of 2019, Gyasi lives in Brooklyn, New York.
I Still Dream About You is a 2010 comedy-mystery novel by American writer Fannie Flagg. Set in Birmingham, Alabama, the story centers on a former Miss Alabama who decides to end her life rather than continue living an unfulfilling existence, and her friendships with idiosyncratic colleagues in a local real estate agency. The novel takes a light tone in describing the main character's failed attempts to kill herself, and provides a vivid look at Birmingham's history, its role in the civil rights movement, and typical Southern mores.
Frances Nimmo Greene was an American educator and author of Southern literature including novels, children's literature, and plays. She was the author of: King Arthur and his court, 1901, stories of chivalry for children; With spurs of gold, 1905, stories of chivalry for children written in collaboration with Dolly Kirk; My country's voice, 1917, for juveniles; America first, 1917, for juveniles; American ideals; a series of patriotic readers for children; a group of one act plays; and the following novels, Into the night, 1909; The Right of the Strongest, 1913; One clear call, 1914; and The devil to pay, 1917.
↑ Zvirin, Stephanie (1 June 2000). "The Watsons Go to Birmingham-- 1963". Booklist. 96: 1875 – via Gale Academic OneFile.
↑ Morgan, Peter E. (Summer 2002). "History for our children: an interview with Christopher Paul Curtis, a contemporary voice in African American Young Adult fiction". MELUS. 27– via Gale Academic OneFile.
1 2 Rogers, Michael (15 October 2004). "Grau, Shirley Ann. The Keepers of the House". Library Journal. 129– via Proquest.
↑ Morrison, Toni (2 January 1972). "South To A Very Old Place: by Albert Murray". New York Times. p.230.
1 2 Staggs, Sam (2 August 1991). "Robert R. McCammon: a veteran of the horror genre has changed directions, after more than 10 books, with a novel set in the South". Publishers Weekly. 238– via Gale Academic OneFile.
Walker, Sue Brannan, and J. William Chambers, eds. Whatever Remembers Us: An Anthology of Alabama Poetry. Mobile, Ala.: Negative Capability Press, 2007.
Don Noble, ed. A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama. Livingston, Ala.: Livingston Press, 2008.
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