Last year was a cruel one for Southern literature, taking from us several of the most eloquent writers who have ever trod the deltas, backwoods, and byways of North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida. Like Flannery O'Connor, Doris Betts, William Gay, Lewis Nordan, and Harry Crews cultivated in their own ways the many-furrowed fields of dysfunctional relationships, broken families, spiritually tortured souls, agnostic preachers (or preachers who simply pretended to embrace the vocation lusting after a woman or a dollar), violent backwater individuals, and rural individuals whose world and values bumped up against an encroaching urban sprawl whose superficial values threatened to suck dry their spirits. Although only Betts explicitly declared the hard-rock faith woven through her fiction—she once told Lee Smith: "Honey, if you ever see a mouse running within the pages of one of my stories, that mouse is a Christian mouse"—each of the other three novelists explored the relationship between faith and doubt, between spiritual aridity and spiritual fullness, in his own fashion.
