It's like I've been waiting for years for someone to ask about this!

hah! You are on it! All I could think of were these collections of stories we read for my southern lit class in grad school: Stories of the Old South and Stories of the New South. There was great stuff in both of them.

Fogel & Engermann's Time On The Cross is a hideous book that someone might recommend to you. I think you should read it, knowing that it's an abomination of history.

Thomas Dixon's The Clansman is the work of fiction that Birth of a Nation was based on.

Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is another work of fiction, but the details are rather eye-opening.

Cormac McCarthy's early work Child of God is a great slice of Southern Gothic.

Sorry, more nonfiction:

Eric Foner's Reconstruction

David Halberstam's The Children (which is the finest book he ever wrote)

Sara Evans - Personal Politics, which is about the way that feminism was changed by the civil rights movement

There was great stuff in both of them.

I have a few of those collections! And I agree.

Cormac McCarthy's early work Child of God is a great slice of Southern Gothic.

Oh yeah. As is Outer Dark .

Cavalier and Yankee by William R. Taylor

William R. Taylor

Okay, that's creepy. That's my dad's name, middle initial and all. And though he is a published author (a filmography of Sydney Pollack published in the late 70s), that is definitely not his book. I guess it's not an unusual name, but it still made me look twice.

Wow, Corwood is all over that!

I'm just all excited about my public library still being Teh Awesome. I was linked to a random YA publisher that has cool books (but not a lot of them), and started seeing if my library had them, but since they're not a big one, wasn't hopeful...but then I realized I'd already read a few of their books. And lo and behold, the library carries most of their books! YAY. So I put a bunch of the interesting ones in their catalog on hold. From my house. At midnight. Cause I can do that too.

I love the future.

More nonfiction:

20th century

Melissa Faye Greene: Praying for Sheetrock - racial politics in a microcosm

The Temple Bombing - While the subject is the 1958 Temple bombing (You may recall that Miss Daisy's response was "But the Temple is Reform."), it's a bigger examination of the Other in the South.

Janisse Ray: Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

As a Vanderbilt grad, I'll put a word in for The Fugitives' I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. I think their basic tenet was wrong like a wrong thing, but they sure wrote pretty.

Civil War/Reconstruction

Albion Tourgée's A Fool's Errand, an 1878 memoir about Reconstruction by the man who later represented Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Mary Chesnut's Civil War (C. Vann Woodward, ed) - like almost any diary, it gets tedious at times, but it's a great contemporary source.

I second the recommendation of The Temple Bombing, and add And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank by Steve Oley. I've also heard good things about The Peddler's Grandson by Edward Cohen, but I've never read it.

So I've got a e-copy of The Moonstone, and this is a good book. Which I guess is why people still keep reading it.