Truman Capote Tribute

"Yesterday afternoon the six o'clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit."

This first great sentence of a wonderful short story is from "Children on Their Birthdays". You'd have to read the rest to understand, of course. I found this gem in a cheap thrift store paperback called "Stories of the Modern South" which include shorts from Welty, Warren, McCullers, O'Conner and Faulkner, among others.

I have always been a fan of great southern lit- one of my universities offered it and it was a wonderful class that offered more insight into the authors I had already discovered by myself at a very young age. I remember in junior high/middle school getting annoyed at the slowness my "AP" teachers taught literature, thinking- we are already there- just show us some things we may have missed. Sometime they did, mostly they didn't.

If you ever want to learn more about good Southern Lit- read Faulkner (for some old schoolin), read O'Flannery for the weird, dark Goth stuff she's so good at, then read some Ellen Gilcrist and Robert Penn Warren ( they made a movie with Sean Penn called All the President's Men- not a great movie but better novel). Eudora Welty my UF profs pushed on us, but I find her very safe and not very exciting, a good writer non the less. Truman Capote- well anyone who knows anything about politics or journalism know what he did. It's not up for discussion. Katherine Ann Porter is one of my favorite female writers of the recent past because she was so prolific you can actually not like some of her stuff and like others- I like to have that choice.

If you ever read Patricia Highsmith, whom I have blogged about before, let me know. She is crazy in a good way. Best writer, yet disturbing. She wrote "The Talented Mr Ripley" and it's really good sequel that John Malcovich did in a movie. But her other stories- whew. You need a night to recover....for real, and it's fiction. She is not a Southern writer but so talented that I have always collected her works.

happy reading!