[MUSIC]
Southern novelists are among the greatest novelists in history.
William Faulkner, Richard Wright, the list goes on.
And when we look at the novel, we see a long view,
a, voice that tells the story of the South.
And it is often a story as in the case of
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines.
Or Absalom, Absalom!,
by William Faulkner,
that spans a century from Civil War to Civil Rights.
And when we look at the novel,
we see within it the episodes of life, of generations.
And the stories of the South that linger in
the ear of a community and are translated and
transferred by the novelist onto the pages of fiction.
Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," is a classic portrait
of southern politics and the legacy of Huey Long in Louisiana.
Mr. Warren grew up in the shadow of the Civil War.
Hearing the stories of his grandfather when he as a child visited him.
And those stories and many others live on through novelists like Robert Penn Warren,
Faulkner, Eudora Welter, and Richard Wright.