Movie Review

Early in this second part of Ross Spears's remarkable three-part documentary on twentieth-century southern literature, the West Virginia writer Mary Lee Settle says of the South: "There's so much wrong and so much that you love and to try and put them together somehow seems to me to be the main job of a southern writer." That is a theme that pervades this film. Spears uses a combination of film and newsreel footage, still photographs, original dramatizations, oral reminiscences, and outright storytelling to capture the regional love/hate perplexities with which writers wrestled in the post–Great Depression, pre–civil rights movement South, in the era that saw Jim Crow at his most entrenched and yet nearing his demise. It is a subject that Spears, an award-winning filmmaker whose past subjects include James Agee, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Civil War, is fully qualified to tell on film.

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The first film in Spears's trilogy deals with the early southern literary renascence during the 1920s and 1930s, and the third will cover the proliferation of regional writing from the 1960s to the present. But as this middle film makes abundantly clear, it was during the 1940s and 1950s that the South's most important writers came of age and dominated, not just regional, but national attention. The focus is on six of those—Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Ralph Ellison, and Lillian Smith—as well as on the latter part of the most illustrious career of all, that of William Faulkner, whose 1962 death marks the era's end.

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