South Carolina

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Beneath the Moon and the Palmetto:
The Writers of South Carolina
By Edwin C. Epps

"My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call."
            -Pat Conroy, "Prologue" to The Prince of Tides 

In these aphoristic words, Pat Conroy's narrator unwittingly characterizes many of the Palmetto State's writers. Proud to be of the state, they are also often cursed because of the association. Parochial as often from choice as from necessity, they draw strength from their native soil only to find limitation in what some view as its incomplete nurture. So some flee it to relocate elsewhere; others, however, embrace its rich pluff mud, sandy loam, and red clay to fashion distinctive voices out of these hybrid nutrients. In the process, those who are most successful find themselves walking a broader stage and addressing a wider audience.

The history of the literature of the Palmetto State rather neatly parallels that of the nation as a whole, at least in its broadest outline. The first period of note occurred during the state's tenure as one of the thirteen original colonies and coincided with the prominence of Charleston as one of the centers of Colonial and, later, early National culture. The earliest titles that can be considered "South Carolina Literature" include travel narratives such as William Hilton's Relation of a Discovery Lately Made on the Coast of Florida, William Bartram's Travels, and John Lawson's New Voyage to Carolina. These were closely followed by histories like David Ramsay's History of South-Carolina, from Its Settlement in 1670, to the year 1808 and his two volume History of the Revolution in South-Carolina.; the papers of prominent politicians such as Henry Laurens; and journals and letterbooks, often essentially economic and agrarian in nature, such as those of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Robert Pringle.

Even this early, though, there were also the beginnings of a culture of fine arts. Newspapers including the South-Carolina Gazette published poetry ("Extract of 'a Poem, entitled INDICO,'" 1757), and Joseph Brown Ladd published his collection The Poems of Arouet in 1786.The artist Washington Alston, whose Lectures on Art, and Poems appeared in 1850 and The Sylphs of the Seasons, with Other Poems much earlier in 1813, was also a novelist, having published Monaldi; a Tale-written around 1820-in 1841. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, an early President of South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina), published his Georgia Scenes in 1835, and twenty years later John Pendleton Kennedy produced his own contribution to the literature of local color in Horse-Shoe Robinson: A Tale of the Tory Ascendancy.

As the United States emerged from its infancy into a confident youth, South Carolina continued to produce writers whose reputations spread far beyond the state's boundaries. William Gilmore Simms contributed volumes of poetry, criticism, journalism, and a collection of Border Romances and other novels whose popularity rivaled that of his Northern contemporary James Fenimore Cooper. Hugh Swinton Legare authored essays on a wide range of subjects; Penina Moise wrote the first book by a Jewish woman in America (Fancy's Sketchbooks, 1833); and William Elliott helped establish a different genre with his Carolina Sports by Land and Water: Including Incidents of Devil-Fishing (1846).

As storm clouds began to gather during the antebellum years and then burst to produce the four-year storm of the Confederacy, South Carolina's writers turned their attention to other topics. Susan Petigru Bowen wrote a series of novels likely to appeal to affluent planters and their wives possessing ample enough leisure time for genteel pursuits like reading. Mary Boykin Chesnut began the famous diary which, although not published until the early twentieth century, continues to characterize the "Old South" for many today. William John Grayson, a distinctly minor poet in any context, is nonetheless important because of his "The Hireling and the Slave," an "answer" to Uncle Tom's Cabin which maintained, among other claims, that the happy lot of the Southern slave was superior to that of his Northern counterpart, the wage slave toiling in the factories of a cruel capitalism.

Other poets less strident than Grayson composed a literature characteristic of the state and its region during this period which continues to be of interest today. Henry Timrod, burdened with the unfortunate title "the Poet Laureate of the Confederacy," penned "Ethnogenesis," "Carolina" (the state song as of 1911), the Magnolia Cemetery "Ode," and many others. Timrod's younger contemporary Paul Hamilton Hayne edited his mentor's work as well as authoring verses of his own celebrating subjects as varied as the state's natural environment and Algernon Charles Swinburne. And of course Simms continued to work throughout the period.

After the political uncertainty and economic dislocation of the Reconstruction era, it wasn't until the 1920s that the state's authors regained a sure footing. When they did, however, it was with a noteworthy determination resulting in the only two Pulitzer Prizes awarded to Sandlappers. In 1927 the play version of DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy became the state's first Pulitzer Prize laureate, followed a year later by Julia Mood Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary. Porgy, of course, then became the basis for the opera Porgy and Bess whose George Gershwin tunes "Summertime," "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'," "It Ain't Necessarily So," and others have become modern classics. During the twenties too, the nation began to notice the quiet poetry and lyrical prose that comprise the nature writing of Archibald Rutledge, one of only two authors whose portraits have graced the halls of the state's General Assembly (Timrod is the other).

Since mid century South Carolina's writers have again assumed a role of national prominence and leadership. Poet, novelist, and critic James Dickey served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1966 to 1968, won the National Book Award for Buckdancer's Choice in 1966, and achieved both celebrity and notoriety following the success of the novel Deliverance and then the film of the same name starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, and Ned Beatty. Dickey continued to write poetry as well as two subsequent novels and taught classes at the University of South Carolina until shortly before his death in 1997.

Others also continue to focus the literary spotlight on the state, most prominently perhaps Pat Conroy, whose Low country epics Beach Music and The Prince of Tides, as well as the earlier works The Water Is Wide, The Great Santini, and The Lords of Discipline, create memorable characters and notably cinematic plots-all have been made into films-and feature finely crafted passages of lyrical prose which make his books linger in the minds of his readers. John Jakes, too, is of South Carolina, residing lately at Hilton Head. Humorist William Price Fox lives in the midlands, and novelist Dori Sanders can still be found tending the family peach stand in York County during the season. Younger writers who have begun to acquire a national following include poets Stephen Corey, John Lane, Susan Ludvigson, Ntozake Shange, and Tommy Scott Young; fiction writers Mignon Ballard, Josephine Humphreys, Brett Lott, and George Singleton; and the whole stable of writers associated with the flourishing Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, which has gained national acclaim as a vigorous regional publisher of outstanding fiction and nonfiction.

The field of South Carolina literature is a rich one, a fact amply demonstrated in the now sadly out-of-print Tricentennial Anthology of South Carolina Literature 1670-1970 (University of South Carolina Press, 1971), in the semiannual Sandlapper magazine, in the South Carolina Review, and in the individual bibliographies of the writers featured on this site. The Carolina parakeet may have been hunted to extinction years ago for its brilliant plumage, but the South Carolina author, a rare bird in its own right--or is it write?--flourishes at the dawn of a new millennium. Its habitat is the mountains, the piedmont, and the coastal plain. Its steady diet is the stuff of the imagination. Moreover, the season on it is always open. Bag one for yourself today.

This essay was submitted by Edwin C. Epps, a teacher at Spartanburg (SC) High School in South Carolina.