A SOUTHERN LITERARY PILGRIMAGE
Iwas in college when I first thumbed through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, its pages glittering with Long Island mansions and jazz soaked New York City speakeasies. What followed was a lifelong love affair with American – and, eventually, Southern – literature that had me delving into William Faulkner’s imagined Mississippi, following Harper Lee to the fictitious Alabama town of Maycomb, and joining Tennessee Williams in fizzing New Orleans.
More than a decade later, I threw a few dog-eared Southern tomes into a suitcase and hit the road to Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi – with their rich literary heritage they promised to be a real page turner.
Where better to begin, I decided, than in New Orleans, a city that’s been home to a Who’s Who of literary greats for many a decade. After swilling a Sazerac cocktail or two at Hotel Monteleone’s Carousel Bar – the likes of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote were regular barflies – I headed out into the French Quarter in search of Williams’ many former places of residence and then ducked into Faulkner House Books, a quaint bookstore in a building where the As I Lay Dying author once lived.
From 'The Big Easy' I headed north-east to Alabama’s Monroeville, the inspiration for the fictional town of Maycomb in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The courthouse, the town’s showpiece, contains displays on Lee and her work and hosts annual theatre performances that bring her novel to life.
Another drive 100 miles or so north-east and I was in Montgomery, the hometown of Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott’s great love and an author and artist in her own right. The city’s literary highlight is the Fitzgeralds’ former home, whose ground floor is now a museum focused on the couple, and where I spent a memorable night in one of the house's two sumptuous suites enhanced by period furniture, artwork and books.
My all-too-short literary safari ended with a four-hour drive north-west to Oxford, Mississippi, and Rowan Oak, the elegant Greek Revival home of William Faulkner. Long his residence and now preserved as a museum, it is crammed with books, newspaper cuttings and the writer’s own typewriter. It was the perfect conclusion to the ultimate literary pilgrimage.