100 Books Like Graceland, At Last

I read this book while working on my own because Horwitz is a master of weaving a story with many characters about a complicated piece of the past. He provides ample detail about the lengths to which reenactors will go for their performances—and some of the methods are outright gross.

But I love that even when Horwitz is grappling with ways that modern interpretations can obscure the actual past, he never resorts to mockery when talking about his subjects. He might disagree with their perspective about the Civil War, but he listens and reports what they tell him. I recommend this for anyone trying to understand how the Civil War still plays such a prominent role in our world nearly two centuries later. 

This classic short story by Flannery O'Connor follows a family on a road trip through the South.

Included on the journey is the manipulative and deceitful grandmother, who somehow convinces the family to take a detour to visit an old plantation home that she remembers from her childhood. The consequences of this detour are chilling.

Spoiler alert, but in the context of the ongoing investigations of our former President, one of the passages really struck a chord, “I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it”

I love this short story collection by Jill McCorkle, because Jill is a master of complex yet subtle emotions—it left me laughing out loud on one page and crying on the next. The characters in each story are flawed and multi-dimensional and so gloriously human that I rooted for them, despite any shortcomings.

In Your Husband Is Cheating on Us, I sympathized with the unnamed narrator/speaker because her humanity shines through, even though she’s the other woman coming clean to her affair partner’s wife (and I was even hoping for her morally murky proposal to succeed). I love the short story form, and this is one of my favorites, but they’re all stellar in this collection. It’s a Funeral! RSVP feels like chatting with a best friend who’s made some questionable decisions, but you love her anyway—especially when the narrator divulges her dark secret. It’s funny and tender and heartbreaking. 

In this classic account, the botanist William Bartram records his exploration of the southern wilderness just before the American Revolution. He portrays the wilderness and the flora and fauna and Indigenous people before white settlement. While researching and writing Boone I referred again and again to his poetic descriptions. Bartram is an inspiration.

The Civil War in this short novel by Bisson, who sadly died in early 2024, is part of the book's backstory. It is set in a 1950s America in which our 1860s Civil War never happened.

In Bisson’s mirror America, Harriet Tubman joined John Brown in his raid on Harper’s Ferry, resulting in a victory for the abolitionists that led to a massive slave uprising in the South, aided by radical Europeans and Mexicans seeking to reclaim territory and ultimately the formation of a new socialist utopia from the former states of the Deep South.

With this bold and radical counterfactual as the backdrop, Bisson uses a chorus of compelling narrations to imagine the more just America that could be—and the struggles it would take to realize it.

This book paints a vivid picture of the symbiotic relationship between 19th-century Southern slave masters and the people they enslaved. It also underscores the fact that for oppressed Black people, allies and enemies came in all colors.

The protagonist, Hiram Walker, is a child prodigy whose intellect and ambition make him poorly suited for a life of servitude. Significantly, Coates speaks to the obligation to “reach back” which those who have achieved a measure of physical, spiritual, or intellectual freedom owe to those who are still enslaved.

Harriet Tubman plays an important role in his narrative because she embodies that ideal.

This autobiography of white Civil Rights activist Lillian Smith unpacks the society that shaped her as she struggled against her childhood lessons about how to interact with Whites and Blacks in the South. Smith deftly immerses you into her world with anecdotes, leading the reader through the interactions that shaped her and other white children across the South, including her experiences with racial violence and racism. Despite being written more than half a century ago, connections remain to our world. My recommendation is to read the 1994 version with an updated introduction placing the work into context.

As a fiction author who investigates the Southern Jewish Experience as it transects with the African American one, I’ve found the work of Eli Evans indispensible. This collection of essays highlights Evans’ Civil Rights Era bona fides, his work in the LBJ administration as speech writer, his trip with Henry Kissinger to the Middle East. But it is also a book at its most personal and insightful when it celebrates small-town Southern life and the Southern Jew’s place in it. In the title essay Christian neighbors, both Black and white, are at church or enjoying Sunday supper after church, which leaves the often isolated Jewish children with little to do. An experimental fishing trip with his father on one such Sunday warms the heart and brings a smile. It’s worth the price of the book entire.

This slim volume packs a mean punch. Following the secession of the seven Deep Southern states in 1860-61, commissioners were sent out to the remaining uncommitted slaveholding states to convince their leaders of the necessity of joining the new Confederate States of America. While the arguments of these secession commissioners included constitutional arguments in favor of secession, they relied even more so on emotional pleas that framed the election of the nation’s first Republican president as a direct threat to the institution of slavery and white supremacy. Their speeches were laced with horrific images of emancipation and a region plunged into racial violence. Charles Dew offers a compelling argument that highlights the importance of slavery and race in the outbreak of war.

This new 2020 book is a fresh synthesis of the scholarly work that has been done on secession and the young Confederacy in the past 30 years and has much that is new to offer  Its treatment of the weeks in Montgomery is rather brief, but insightful, and overall it makes a fine introduction to the political life of the CSA.