A novel set in Greenville County. When single mother Annie Boatright marries Glen, he becomes jealous of the powerful bond between mother and daughter. (White trash)

Maya Angelou's latest incarnation is as poet, but she has been just about everything: actress, dancer, writer, etc. This book was written during the racial unrest of the 1970s. It is heavily autobiographical. It is the first in a series of books reflecting on changing values in her lifetime. If you read one of her books, you will want to read them all! (African American)

Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young black boy grows. Also a 1982 movie available on video tape. (African American)

"The story of the Allson family of Cedar Point in low-country South Carolina. Set in 1916, most of the tale involves the maturation of the 14-year-old narrator, Willie T. Allson, who learns about sex, death, history and the fragile nature of happiness." – Jacket (Southern)

A Southern writer's first collection of short stories, each in which a gentle insurrection changes lives.

The story of a young girl, born in the Hungry Neck section of Charleston, who was raised by her grandmother and an abusive step-grandfather. (African American)

The impoverished Rincons (an illegal alien couple from Mexico) and the Mossbachers (a rich, liberal Los Angeles couple) are brought together by a freak accident. "Their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding." –Jacket (Transcultural)

A homeless boy who lives in an airport with his father, moving from terminal to terminal and trying not to be noticed, is given hope when he sees a trapped bird find its freedom. (African American)

A native of Allendale, Charleston newspaper columnist has written his first novel about steaming political power and corruption in South Carolina. The story is loosely based on issues related to environmental contamination and experimentation on human health at the Savannah River plant.

A warm, wonderful story about growing up in Southern country. It shows the values of the people, as well as family responsibilities placed on children. You might rent the movie, but you would miss the good parts! (Southern white)

Farm life in the mountains of North Carolina.

Written during the Vietnam War by a draft dodger, deferred by agreeing to teach school on an inaccessible island off the coast of South Carolina (Daufuskie). It is a chronicle of culture shock to the African American students as well as to the white teacher. Not long, easy to read; a true story. (Southern white)

A disillusioned Southern coach reveals his tortured childhood in order to help his troubled, suicidal sister, and discovers the healing powers of love and forgiveness. According to our resident amateur Southern sociologist, Margaret Curtis, "The best thing [Conroy] ever wrote is the prologue to Prince of Tides ...don't neglect to read it. It really has nothing to do with the book" (personal communication, April 9, 2000). (Southern white)

In the film, "Daughters of the Dust," award-winning film maker, Julie Dash, told the story of the day in 1902 when matriarch Haagar Peazant and her extended family celebrated their ancestry before leaving Dawtuh Island, off the Carolina coast, for the North. Now it is 1926, and Haagar's granddaughter, Amelia, raised in Harlem in "de better way of living," returns to Dawtuh Island against Haagar's wishes to conduct fieldwork for her senior thesis, "The Colored People of the Carolina Coast." Through her extended family on the island, Amelia reclaims her Gullah heritage. "Juxtaposing the shared myths of the Island with theoral history of a family, Julie Dash shows us storytelling as a living tradition–a powerful means of understanding our world, of preserving our heritage and community" [jacket]. See the video, then read the novel! (Gullah)

A true murder story that took place near Saluda, South Carolina, in the early 1940s stemming from a feud between two families which began in the 1920s. "Featuring an unlikely cast of antagonistis--among them a prominent store owner, an elementary school teacher, and a Spartanburg law officer who hid in the getaway car while a hired gunman shot his enemy--the acts of revenge resulted in five murders. Another three people were put to death in the electric chair, including the first woman to be electrocuted in South Carolina" (Inside front book jacket).

Emotional ties, secrets, and wounds pervade a prominent Southern family. Returning home to her Timmons, South Carolina, home after her father's sudden death, Annie Vess discovers deception behind the honorable facade of his life. An Oprah choice! (Southern)

"She had as much business keeping a stray dog as she had walking across Egypt–which not so incidentally is the title of her favorite hymn. She's Mattie Rigsbee, and independent, strong-minded senior citizen who at 78 might be slowing down just a bit. When young, delinquent Wesley Benfield drops in on her life, he is even less likely a companion than a stray dog. But, of course, the dog never tasted her mouth-watering pound cake." – Jacket (Southern white)

Set in the 1950s in a small town in North Carolina, the reader is introduced "to good ole boys, good little boys, little old ladies with loaded shot guns, and an ancient dog who predicts the weather...the story of what happened back when rootless amorality met up with deep-rooted moral flexibility." – Jacket (Southern white)

A Charleston tour guide for 20 years, Farrow has written a novel about four children who grew up in downtown Charleston in the 1950s, a serial killer, root medicine, and a search for God. The conflict between scientific crime detection and island voodoo keeps the reader turning the pages. You can actually feel the culture, the sights and sounds, and the deep history of this beautiful city and the sometimes dark secrets of its people. (Southern)

"Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe is the now-classic novel of two women in the 1980s; of gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women--of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth--who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present--for Evelyn and for us--will never be quite the same again..." (ReadingGroupGuide.com) (Southern)

William Fox was born and raised in "The Bottom," a Columbia, SC, neighborhood inhabited by African Americans and whites too poor to move away from each other. His books are really funny looks at "Red Necks" and "White Trash." The author does not have the remotest idea how to end a story, but getting there is lots of fun. (White trash)

About growing up on Sullivan's Island in the 1970s & divorce. The main character and her sister speak Gullah to each other, like Charlstonians do, even though they speak English at school.(Southern middle class white)

Family trials, tribulation, and love on a modern-day plantation west of Charleston. (Southern middle class white)

Winner of a South Carolina Fiction Project prize in 2003, the Greenville author was inspired to write this novel after discovering a decaying, but elegnat, mansion in the Upstate. Two women are bound to their homes--one from nostalgia and the other from agoraphobia. Their chance meeting and disparate motivations bind them together in an unusual way. Includes two love stories and two family feuds intertwined.

Set on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation in the 1970s, racial tensions arise over the death of a Cajun farmer at the hands of a black man. Eighteen old black men all claim to have shot the farmer and threaten to provoke a riot if the sheriff tries to make an arrest. (Southern)

"The story of a redoubtable girl who overcomes adversity with humor, spunk, and determination" in the backwoods South. (Southern)

"When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. Se was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life." – Jacket (Southern)

Funny, trashy novel about funny trashy Southerners in and around Myrtle Beach. This book will show you the glaring differences between "Red Neck" and "White Trash." Sarah Gilbert is the wife of William Price Fox, another humorous white trash author. His influence is evident in Dixie Riggs and Hairdo. (White trash)

Describes the joys of summer spent with family in Knoxville: eating vegetables right from the garden, going to church picnics, and walking in the mountains. (African American docudrama)

Shocking, chilling, and mesmorizing short stories based on the author's ancestral culture in Planersville community of Georgetown County. Home remedies and superstitions related to death, hags, revenge, pregnancy, bad luck, nature, and love and marriage.

A novel first published as a serial in the Southern magazine of good writing, Oxford American. Seven-year-old Luke Chandler witnesses his family's struggle to harvest the cotton crop on their Arkansas farm. Tensions between groups of farm workers, Mexican and Ozark "hill people," lead to a tragedy. (White)

Life in a small Mississippi town in the late 1950s. An Oprah's Book Club selection. (White trash)

This is a story of an African-American mother, daughter, and granddaughter and their relationship to a Charlstonian aristocratic family which slid into genteel poverty after the Civil War. The characters address the issues of race, class, and sex in the South in the pre-WWII II era. Mamba's Daughters was first published in 1929 and reissued in 1995 as a "Southern Classic" with a comprehensive introduction by Don H. Doyle. On stage at Spoleto USA in 1999! (George Gershwin's opera, Porgy and Bess , was based on Porgy by Heyward.) (African American)

Sequel to Doc Hollywood. An internist is "stuck" in a south Georgia small town.

A love story amidst the Civil War in Scuffletown, an Indian community in North Carolina, attacked by both the Union Army and Confederate Home Guard. (Southern)

"The place: Claxton, South Carolina. The time: not long ago. Just as the pleasantly quiet life of Bright Birdsong, the sixty-eight-year-old matriarch of a prominent local clan, is threatening to become downright boring, winds of change begin to blow--her estranged daughter pays a visit; a tragic accident ignites old racial tensions in the community; and a sex scandal erupts involving her son, the governor--and Bright finds herself with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to right old wrongs and to reconcile who she has become with who she wants to be" (Back cover). (Southern)

1979 in Moseley, GA -- 16 year-old Trout Moseley's mother is in an Atlanta psychiatric facility and his 300 pound father is a Methodist minister who rides a motorcycle and compares Jesus to Elvis. "There was something comfortably predictable about a Dairy Queen, Trout thought. The menu, the regulars...." (p. 61) (Southern)

Each short story about kinfolks, homefolks, women and men folks, white folks, and church folks, is followed by the author's cultural perspective. (Southern, rural, African American)

The story of an elderly man, Sam Peek, newly widowed, whose adult children feel is ready for a nursing home. He wants to continue driving his dilapidated truck to the fields to care for his beloved pecan trees. When Sam begins to tell of his encounters with a white dog, his children think grief and old age have affected his mind. The resulting story is a heartwarming reflection on the needs of the elderly and their families. Dramatized for television in 1994 (Hallmark Hall of Fame). (Southern white)

The author, born into segregation and Logan's Law–the law of the way things are–writes a novel of Southerners who thumbed their noses at Logan's Law and the earliest beginnings of desegregation in the South in the 1940s. The discovery of a human bone by two young playmates–one black, one white–leads to investigation of a racially motivated killer. A powerful, eloquently written story of racial disharmony, justice, and peace. (Southern)

Chauncey Doolittle is a farmer in the Upcountry of South Carolina and a storyteller who prefers simple pleasures to air conditioning, alarm clocks, tree farming, cities, and life in the fast lane. "A masterful blend of satiric wit, country humor, literary allusions and intentional puns" -- David Aiken, The Post & Courier, October 31, 2004

A novel set in South Carolina in 1964, amidst civil rights tensions. Beekeeping provides the background for resolving family conflict and racial conflict as well as illustrating the strength of women. It's difficult to put this one down!

A story of the ties of land, blood, and honor that bind and threaten to destroy two families. At the center are two brother and their cousin, the mixed-race woman one brother loves and the other dishonors. A complex love story woven from the threads of actual events. (Southern)

Short, easy-to-read book. It is important because it shows the beginnings of the change in race relations in the South and the feelings on both sides of the issue. Note as you read, the class of people espousing the different viewpoints. Also available on video tape (1962 movie rereleased on video tape 1991). (Southern white)

The publisher's best seller!

A historical novel, set in the South Carolina Sea Islands about the other Civil War – the Civil War from the perspective of the slaves. This is "the story of a South Carolina slave whose dring Civil War escape from Confederate Charleston to the Union Navy brings him face to face with his freedom, and closer still to his own soul (book jacket). A docudrama worth reading!

Poignant story of what it was really like to grow up African American before integration became law. A very personal, powerful, moving account. (African American)

This is the story of a modern juju woman living on the isolated island off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, trying to keep the land in the family and the family together. Good description of folkways and mores, and contrast with modern culture. The author also wrote Women of Brewster Place, which was on television with Oprah Winfrey. (African American)

Fourteen stories explore the contemporary family across socioeconomic status, inner city and suburbs of the midwest to coastal towns in the South.

A teen (living on an isolated and undeveloped South Carolina coast) possessed with a vocabulary and sophistication beyond his years is caught between his eccentric mother, who is convinced her son can be a genius writer, and his father, who wants him raised among the upper class on Hilton Head. (Southern)

Reynolds Price is a superb example of the Southern storyteller. Any of his books will give you flavor and values of Southerners. (Southern)

Short stories–ordinary people in ordinary times, family, sexuality, fate, chance encounters (Southern)

A 90 year old woman's story of life in a small North Carolina town. (Southern)

A 12-year-old's drowning in the Tamassee River in Oconee County, South Carolina, polarizes a community over rescue of her body, pitting the family of the victim against staunch environmentalists. Caught in the middle is a young photographer who returns to her home town to cover the event. Filled with a cast of small-town gems and elegant writing.

Winner of the Pen American Center: Beyond Margins Award 2004. Set in Arkansas in 1976, a young woman returns to her birth mother searching for answers to "Who're your people, girl?" The story of three generations of Black women in a family troubled by loss and love. (Black, Southern) (Available at Charleston County Library)

Small town in South Carolina fractured by murder, public danger, and private exposure. Confronts complex ideas about bigotry, love, and modern society through a psychological mystery.

Ferrol Sams is a physician in Georgia. His books are memories of a Southern childhood on the family farm, including the extended family, the hired help, and the animals. Although most modern farmers do no live exactly like this, the values remain pretty much the same. A hilariously funny story which will make you laugh out loud and roll on the floor! (Southern white)

Short and easy to read. Good description of relations between the races when a little girl's father dies, leaving her to be raised by a white stepmother. Wonderful description and characterization. (Southern)

A chronology of societal change experienced by ordinary people in a rural South Carolina community post World War II through the 1980s as told through the life of Mae Lee -- a black, teenage war bride, then proud mother, abandoned wife, successful farmer, retiree and town dweller, proud grandmother, and first black hospital auxiliary member. (African American)

Ghost stories -- a collection of 30 short and spooky tales. (African folklore)

Unhappy with her life at home, Sukey receives kindness and wealth from Mama Jo the mermaid. San Souci writes wonderful children's stories with a point! (African folklore)

Sayers was born and raised in Beaufort. She writes about faith lost, crazy loneliness, rebellion and reconciliation in the sleepy coastal town of Due East, SC, following the seduction and suicide of a teenage "nerd" by a willful young girl.

Sequel to Due East –5 years later. More love and life in a small coastal town in South Carolina.

A story of personal renewal and transformation–one woman's proper Old South upbringing and expectations colliding with the new South's runaway prosperity. (Southern)

Read this if you want a great laugh about Southern eccentricity! The author, from Ninety-Six, SC, "creates a dead-on portrait of the way we carry our childhoods into adulthood and how, despite vows to leave small towns, we can end up back home, still running, like stray dogs hoping a passing car will stop and give us a ride somewhere else" (Keir Graff,
American Library Association) (Charleston County Library)

Lee Smith teaches English at North Carolina State University. Her novels and short stories are about small town life and the hilarious families who live there. You will recognize most of your relatives as you laugh and cry through her stories. (Southern white)

The author is from somewhere between Mt. Pleasant and McClellanville. The story is about a black girl who thinks she has better things to do in life than weave and sell sweet grass baskets on the Highway 17 By-Pass. Includes superstitions and folkways which continue to this day. More modern than other books on the list. (Southern black)

A meticulously researched historical novel, set in and around Camden, SC, in the 1780s. Depicts ordinary citizens in their resistance to the British army during the southern campaign of the Revolutionary War and establishment of an independent nation. (Southern white)

A warm, humorous story centered around an intellectually curious teen learning about her background through oral history. (African American)

Alice Walker is a mystic writer. She claims this book came to her like "automatic writing." It is about middle class African Americans. It illustrates some values and some cultural contrasts. Super-duper book, fair to middling movie. Also available on video tape. (African American)

Four, wild, lifelong girlfriends (the "Ya-Yas") who grew up in the Louisiana bayou are as crazy as ever, but help one of their daughters find peace with her tumultuous childhood through her mother's scrapbook entitled, "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood." (Southern white) (LCAHEC library)

"An intimate glimpse into the African American middle class. Set on bucolic Martha'sVineyard in the 1950s...we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who...has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grapple with the changing face of its community..one family's struggle to break the shackles of race and class." – Jacket (African American)

A colllection of short stories about black, country women in small towns, up hollers, and across knobs. "Black and juicy, just like a blackberry" (p. 2) (rural African American)

The setting is Charleston and Wadmalaw Island near Rockville. The narrater, an elderly Charlestonian blueblood, reflecting upon the dramatic changes in his life following the funeral of federal judge, Waties Waring, his former mentor. Waring was the first judge to write that "separate but equal is not equal" and subsequently expelled from Charleston society. The author, a former South Carolinian, writes with intimate knowledge of "Southern culture with it almost incomprehensible (certainly peculiar) racial dynamics and comedy of manners that overarch all behavior" (G. Randle, back cover). (urban blueblood & rural African American)