Deep South USA:
The Write Way
Take a literature-themed road trip in the wake of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Harper Lee to uncover the rich stories, enduring issues and irrepressible spirit of the southern states...
'The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar.’ F Scott Fitzgerald wrote these honeyed words in 1920 – they open The Ice Palace, a tale of a restless Southern belle who strikes north with her new love. As I drove the curved path to the Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, I thought of these words as I rounded the bend. Evening light had coloured everything in pastels. The cedar-shingled house, where F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived for a stint in the early 1930s, was washed with peach sunshine. Out front, a tree stood slick with wisteria and the road glowed amber.
This former residence, now a museum, has two suites that have been available to rent on Airbnb since 2018. It was my home for a few days and the first stop on a literature-themed road trip through the Deep South. My journey would take me from Alabama’s capital city to the belly of New Orleans, on the tail of writers such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. But my first rendezvous was with the Fitzgeralds.
Francis Scott (known as Scott) and Zelda are held up as the perfect Jazz Age couple. Their stories – the most famous of which is Scott’s The Great Gatsby – glamourise champagne-drenched nights in New York City and sun-baked days on France’s Côte d’Azur. And in many ways, the Fitzgeralds’ real life was as glittering as those of their protagonists. He had met 18-year-old Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court Justice, at the Montgomery Country Club. What followed was a whirlwind romance that saw the pair whisk across the world, from Alabama to New York, Paris to Rome.
The suites at the Fitzgerald house contain furniture donated by childhood friends of Zelda’s (Alamy)
The suites at the Fitzgerald house contain furniture donated by childhood friends of Zelda’s (Alamy)
“Zelda loved her hometown of Montgomery,” Máire Martello, guide and board member at the Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, told me. “But ultimately she wanted to see the world. Scott could offer her that.”
The museum covers the ground floor of the Fitzgeralds’ former home, and is a veritable shrine to the literary couple. I pored over rare books with dedications penned in Scott’s hand, original watercolours by Zelda and dresses once belonging to their only daughter, Scottie. But the spirit of the Fitzgeralds isn’t confined to a museum – it’s out on Montgomery’s streets.
The sign which stands outside the Fitzgerald Home (Shutterstock)
The sign which stands outside the Fitzgerald Home (Shutterstock)
My tour with Martello covered hallowed ground for Fitzgerald fans. We stood before the Alabama State Capitol, where a young Zelda would have twirled on skates with her friend Tallulah Bankhead. And we ducked into Chris’ Hot Dogs, a veteran food joint favoured by the Fitzgeralds. Zelda resumed ballet lessons in a studio right above the restaurant when she returned here in the 1930s.
“Zelda and Scott lived at the very top of the champagne bottle,” Martello said. “And when things went south, Montgomery was a refuge for her.”
By the time the couple returned to Montgomery in 1931, their gilded life was beginning to tarnish. Zelda’s father was ill and she herself had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Scott was struggling with his fourth novel, Tender Is The Night, and the pair quarrelled fiercely. Yet if their former home was a marital battleground, you’d never tell today.
I stayed in the Zelda suite, the walls of which are hung with scribbled love notes from Zelda to Scott, and whose chintzy rugs and dark-wood furniture is a nod to the period. A portrait of Zelda, poised in a candyfloss-pink dress, hangs above the fireplace.
As birdsong gave out to crickets, and the sun snuffed out over the leafy Old Cloverdale district, I settled on the sofa and thumbed through Save Me The Waltz. Zelda wrote this novel in a six-week frenzy and worked on it right here in this house. It’s a thinly veiled portrait of the Fitzgeralds’ own marriage and it takes on extra poignancy in this space.
It isn’t the only troubled tale found in Montgomery. In this city, there are no stories more important than those told at the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum, which I visited before I checked in. Montgomery was once the capital of the Confederacy and one of America’s busiest slave-trading hubs. Now the city is staring this dark history square in the face. The museum is unflinching and visceral, and I took in mixed-media exhibits covering the horrors of the Middle Passage – the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic – and today’s mass incarceration of Black Americans. Southern literature was, and is, often bound up with issues of race, sometimes challenging Civil Rights abuses and other times glorifying an Old South built on the backs of enslaved peoples. Fitzgerald has been widely criticised for his racial stereotyping, and at best he and Zelda were too consumed by their swirling, booze-blurred world to look outward.
“The opening act began on the lawn outside. But when the performance moved into the courtroom, the atmosphere fizzed”
Turning the page
That’s not true of Harper Lee, the next author I visited on my literary tour. Her classic novel, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), centres on lawyer Atticus Finch and his attempts to acquit a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. It’s set in the 1930s, in a wilting town named Maycomb, in the heart of the Jim Crow South.
Lee writes: ‘Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks…’ Her own hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, about 160km south-west of Montgomery, inspired Maycomb, and it’s a near cookie-cutter copy of the fictional place, right down to the courthouse that ‘sagged in the square’. But when I arrived in Monroeville, it was hard to imagine that the town had ever seen rain. The sun lit up brick walls crawling with bookish murals and the dome on the 1903 courthouse burned white.
The town isn’t tired, either – Harper Lee’s legacy has given Monroeville perpetual life. The courthouse, which Lee would visit as a young girl to watch her own lawyer father in action, is stuffed with exhibits relating to the author, as well as to her friend and fellow writer Truman Capote. Best of all, though, it’s the setting for an annual theatre production of To Kill A Mockingbird, and the show was running while I was in town.
The opening act began on the lawn outside the courthouse: Atticus Finch was cut in a butter-yellow suit and child protagonists Scout and Jem kicked about the grassy stage in denim overalls. But when the performance moved into the courtroom, the atmosphere fizzed. The oval-shaped space is styled as it would have been in the 1930s, down to the curving balcony and the position of the witness chair right before the judge.
In 1934, a similar real-life story unfolded here. A Black man, Walter Lett, was sentenced to death by an all-white jury for raping a white woman. It was eventually accepted that he was falsely accused, but he died of tuberculosis while in prison. Still today, Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white citizens. And, as the play unfolded, it felt like the past was echoed and the present day was roundly paralleled. As William Faulkner famously wrote: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’.
White rooftop of the Monroeville County Court (Shutterstock)
White rooftop of the Monroeville County Court (Shutterstock)
The Mockingbird Company stages a live adaptation of the novel in front of and inside the historic courthouse building (Alamy)
The Mockingbird Company stages a live adaptation of the novel in front of and inside the historic courthouse building (Alamy)
The Mockingbird Company stages a live adaptation of the novel in front of and inside the historic courthouse building (Alamy)
The Mockingbird Company stages a live adaptation of the novel in front of and inside the historic courthouse building (Alamy)
The lonesome south
I set my sights next on Oxford, Mississippi, the town Faulkner called home for much of his life. This divisive author wrote his most celebrated works in the late 1920s and 30s, at the height of the Southern Renaissance. But while his peers pooled into northern US cities, or escaped to boltholes across the Atlantic, the Mississippi-born writer focused on his ‘own little postage stamp of native soil’.
That native soil spooled out before me as I drove north-west, to Lafayette County. Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional region that’s a backdrop for many of Faulkner’s novels, is based on Lafayette; the make-believe county seat of Jefferson was inspired by Oxford. At Faulkner’s long-term home, Rowan Oak, curator Bill Griffith told me that the lay of the land is not so different from Faulkner’s day: “The rivers and farms are still here; they just grow soybeans instead of cotton now.”
William Faulkner lived at Rowan Oak, his Greek Revival home in Oxford, for more than 40 years (Shutterstock)
William Faulkner lived at Rowan Oak, his Greek Revival home in Oxford, for more than 40 years (Shutterstock)
I’d reached Rowan Oak – which Faulkner bought in 1930 and lived in until his death – via the Bailey Woods Trail, one of the writer’s favourite places to wander. Underfoot, the earth was like playdough. A storm had not long passed and another threatened to break. The scent of wisteria stung the air, as soupy and stifling as Faulkner’s prose, and lilac petals flecked the ground like confetti. Eventually, an alley of eastern red cedars framed the Greek Revival home.
The house is captured as it would have been in the 1960s – a perfect snapshot of literary history. I ambled between a jumble of rooms, peering into Faulkner’s writing room, where a typewriter is set atop a humble wooden table. The plot outline for his 1954 novel A Fable is scrawled onto the wall. His bedroom is filled with riding boots and books.
Griffith described Rowan Oak as Faulkner’s “sanctuary – the perfect distance from town”. And it’s no wonder that Faulkner preferred to keep some distance. His novels captured a decaying South during the Reconstruction era and his characters – most of them deeply flawed, and even grotesque – were ripped from his homeland.
Oxford Square in Mississippi is home to a statue of William Faulkner (Shutterstock)
Oxford Square in Mississippi is home to a statue of William Faulkner (Shutterstock)
“People were used to books about the glory of the antebellum South. But Faulkner spoke about things Southerners didn’t want to talk about,” Griffith said. “And you can go to the square now and you can meet a different character everyday. Faulkner was writing about universal human attitudes.”
However, back in the town centre, it was hard to recognise this as Faulkner country now. Oxford is a buzzy college city crawling with students from ‘Ole Miss’ – the University of Mississippi. Hip Southern restaurants and balconied bars ring the main square, with the Lafayette County Courthouse a neat white pin at its centre. Enjoying a whiskey or two at Faulkner’s graveside remains an Ole Miss rite of passage; I toasted him with a whiskey sour at the hotel bar instead, ready to hit the road the next day.
“The New Orleans of the day – its debauchery, its textured streetlife, its ‘tinny pianos’ – is as much a protagonist in Streetcar as Stanley, Stella and Blanche”
Finding a voice
New Orleans was my finale. I arrived on a sticky Easter weekend, when the streets were thick with revellers in pastel suits and bunny ears. Beads were tangled in iron balconies and a woman sat in a shop doorway belting out Etta James’s ‘At Last’, her voice as sweet as a sugar-powdered beignet.
“Everyday is carnival day in New Orleans,” laughed tour guide Arthur Morgan Smith, perched on a stool at French Quarter dive bar Harry’s Corner. I met up with him for his ‘Bards & Barflies of Bohemia’ literary tour, a journey on the heels of authors including Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Few places on earth boast such an impressive list of literary alumni as the Big Easy – and I could see why. In the screaming heart of the French Quarter, a place oiled with jazz and bourbon, there’s a sense that life exists nowhere but here.
“Most writers spent only a short time in New Orleans,” Smith said. “But the city changed them in some way – they found their true nature here.”
That was true of no one more than the playwright Tennessee Williams, who spent his formative years here in NOLA. Born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911, Williams had a puritanical upbringing, arriving in New Orleans one day in his late 20s, when the mayhem of Mardi Gras had swallowed the city whole.
“I imagine it was like in The Wizard of Oz, after the black-and-white scenes end,” Smith mused. “He got here and everything was Technicolor. And he said: this is my city. This is where I belong.” Here Williams discovered his creative identity and explored his sexuality – he describes his years before New Orleans as a ‘series of little adventures unconsummated’.
But he was “a restless soul”, according to Smith, so the city is littered with his former residences. Smith and I stood before 632½ St Peter Street, a humble burnt-red building once in earshot of the rattling Desire streetcar. “Tennessee was writing to save his career when he lived here,” Smith said; The Glass Menagerie (1944) had been Williams’ first huge hit on the stage, but he’d struggled to match it since. However, A Streetcar Named Desire, which he finished in this very apartment in 1947, would cement his status as a playwriting heavyweight. And the New Orleans of the day – its debauchery, its textured streetlife, its ‘tinny pianos’ – is as much a protagonist in Streetcar as Stanley, Stella and Blanche, whose fictional apartment shares street number ‘632’ with Williams himself.
The tour also took me to 1014 Dumaine St, the only house the writer ever owned. It’s got a pool in the back where Williams swam everyday. After a dip in the water, he’d often head to Antoine’s Restaurant, a swish French-Creole spot that was opened in 1840 and is still operating today.
Then, we pushed onwards to Faulkner House Books, the New Orleans home of William Faulkner, now a bookshop stacked with Southern classics and hung with black-and-white photos of the greats. We passed the lavish Hotel Monteleone, my base while in town, whose literary history is as mightily impressive as its lobby grandfather clock. Writers including Williams, Capote, Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway all stayed at this storied late-19th-century property, sinking sundowners at the glittering Carousel Bar.
“These writers, they came to New Orleans, and they found themselves,” Smith told me. “And they belonged to the world after that.”
Architecture in the French Quarter of New Orleans (Shutterstock)
Architecture in the French Quarter of New Orleans (Shutterstock)
Mardi Gras takes place in New Orleans (Shutterstock)
Mardi Gras takes place in New Orleans (Shutterstock)
New Orleans’ Maison Bourbon is one of only two jazz clubs still keeping the genre alive on Bourbon Street (Shutterstock)
New Orleans’ Maison Bourbon is one of only two jazz clubs still keeping the genre alive on Bourbon Street (Shutterstock)
Entrance to Faulkner House Books (Shutterstock)
Entrance to Faulkner House Books (Shutterstock)
5 Deep South writers’ haunts
1. Tuskegee, Alabama
Tuskegee University is now a historic site (Shutterstock)
Tuskegee University is now a historic site (Shutterstock)
A 45-minute drive east of Montgomery, this city is best known for the Tuskegee Airmen – a group of predominantly Black military aviators who trained at the former Tuskegee Army Air Field.
However, it’s got an intricate literary heritage too.
In 1881, author and orator Booker T Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University. The historically Black university was attended by both Ralph Waldo Ellison, author of acclaimed 1952 novel The Invisible Man, and Albert Murray, a critic and novelist whose work centred on issues of race.
Today, at the university’s Ford Motor Company Library, Murray’s life is chronicled through detailed exhibits and you can pore over his collection of books, including jazz tomes and rare volumes filled with fairytales. Washington is buried at the university, too..
2. Jackson Lake Island, Alabama
'Big Fish' abandoned movie set in Jackson Lake Island (Alamy)
'Big Fish' abandoned movie set in Jackson Lake Island (Alamy)
Thick with Spanish moss and home to a tribe of roaming goats, Jackson Lake Island is a popular camping spot. It’s also the site of an abandoned movie set used during the filming of Big Fish (2003), based on Daniel Wallace’s 1998 novel. The book follows protagonist William Bloom, who attempts to make sense of his father’s elaborate stories as the man lays dying. Languishing on the island is what’s left of the film’s fictional town of Spectre, complete with pint-sized houses, a creaking clapboard church and a line hung with shoes. Close by, in the cute little town of Wetumpka, you’ll find Big Fish House, another movie location, now privately owned.
3. Jackson, Mississippi
Home of Eudora Welty, Jackson (Shuttertstock)
Home of Eudora Welty, Jackson (Shuttertstock)
Home of the annual Mississippi Book Festival, Jackson has plenty to tempt literature lovers. Make time especially for the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University; the contemporary space holds exhibits dedicated to the poet, novelist and activist, who originally hailed from Birmingham, Alabama.
Jackson was also home to short-story writer Eudora Welty. Tour her Belhaven home and one of her haunts, Lemuria Books, which is fit to burst with Southern novels, music titles and rare first editions.
4. Columbus, Mississippi
Former home of Tennessee Williams, Columbus (Shutterstock)
Former home of Tennessee Williams, Columbus (Shutterstock)
Within kissing distance of the Alabama border, Columbus is the birthplace of Tennessee Williams. Today, the former home of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright – a Victorian pile with a sunshine-yellow façade and striking gabled roof – serves as Columbus’s welcome centre. Guided tours of the property are possible.
5. New Iberia, Louisiana
New Iberia (Shutterstock)
New Iberia (Shutterstock)
Arranged along the chocolatey channel of Bayou Teche, New Iberia is almost synonymous with author James Lee Burke, creator of the Dave Robicheaux detective series. As a child, Burke summered with relatives in the city, eventually bringing his own family to live here for a period. His love affair with New Iberia has never burnt out and the teensy city is a setting for many of his books. Its centre is East Main, which, in one of his novels, Burke describes as ‘probably one of the most beautiful streets in the Old South’. Here, Lee’s brooding detective swills coffee at Victor’s Cafeteria, called out by name in multiple books. The nearby Tabasco Factory on the salt-dome Avery Island gets a mention in The Neon Rain, too. Check out the little exhibition dedicated to Burke at the Bayou Teche Museum.
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