For classic, I mean anything pre-1900. I’m trying to read a bunch of books that take place all over America and figured I should start close to home. Any genre is fine, any subject matter is fine, I’m down for anything and everything.
by ChupacabraRVA
21 Comments
I’ll start with the obvious. *Gone With the Wind?*
“Life on the Mississippi” by Mark Twain. May or may not be regarded as “classic” but certainly is a classics author. It’s a rather unique book. It’s more like a memoir of a particular time in the author’s life.
Swallow Barn (1832) (Virginia)
The Yemassee (1835) (South Carolina)
The Partisan (1835) (South Carolina)
The Lily and the Totem (1850) (Florida)
The Valley of Shenandoah (1824) (Virginia)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) (North Carolina)
If you haven’t read Mark Twain, that’d be a good place to start. [Tom Sawyer](https://amzn.to/3PDnMRe) and [Huck Finn](https://amzn.to/3PGnXuX) are both classics.
Try the novels of George Cable. He wrote about New Orleans at the time it became an American state, instead of a French territory. Zora Neale Hurston is writing a bit later, but her writing is about people near your time frame. She wrote a book about the last person believed to have been taken from Africa as a slave. She writes mostly about Florida.
Lonesome Dove. It’s set in Texas in the late 1800’s. Some of the novel is set in northern US like Montana though
Not pre 1900 but Wise Blood by Flannery O’Conner is a good place to start in the Southern Gothic genre. Her short stories are also well regarded.
When you write america are you referring to the continents or native groups or the usa?
*The Known World* by Edward P. Jones is one of my favorite books of all time! It is a historical-fiction mainly set in Virginia in the antebellum period. It won a Pulitzer prize for fiction when it came out and for good reason!
Happy reading!
Last of the Mohicans, Cold Mountain
Unfortunately, 19th century American Lit heavily underrepresented the southeast.
Some that come to mind were already mentioned (Mark Twain, Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer). There is Frederick Douglas’s autobiography. (I am skipping Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but that fits the request)
The Red Badge of Courage. (Steven Crane)
The Sport of the Gods. (Paul Dunbar) about a family from the south, who moved north. If you like poetry, Dunbar was primarily a poet and wrote beautifully.
Edgar Allen Poe was a southerner (sort of. Maryland is -barely- below the Mason Dixon line) but his locations are not what you are looking for.
Some of my favorites from the late 19th century/early 20th would be Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, but their stories are placed farther north. And Zane Grey – while his were mostly western, the Betty Zane/Ohio River trilogy was semi southeastern.
Hope this helps
Twelve Years a Slave
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zoe’s Neale Hurston
Midnight in the garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
If you’re willing to stretch your timeframe to include 1901, check out The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chestnut.
While it has become somewhat controversial in modern discourse, I’m not sure there are many books more impactful than “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I think it is safe to say it is one of the most important books in American literature.
It doesn’t quite fit your requirements, but my Antonia by Willa Cather. Set in Nebraska, published in the early 1900s.
OK, this was published in 1901 but is set in 1898: The Marrow of Tradition, by Charles Waddell Chesnutt. It depicts a real-world event, the Wilmington (NC) Massacre, in which white supremacists seized power from the local elected government, murdering a bunch of people and destroying a lot of Black-owned property along the way. Chesnutt portrays the massacre through the experience of white, black, and biracial characters.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin takes place in New Orleans at the end of the 19th century
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury is often recommended. But if you haven’t read To Kill A Mockingbird, you should, asap. Neither is pre-1900, though.
Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Mark Twain should all be on your list.
One of my all time favorites Lonesome Dove
Gone With The Wind is a very enjoyable read