Local Color

This issue is replete with the color and vibrancy of place, setting and spoken language. What came to be called the Local Color Movement was especially vigorous for over a half century after the Civil War, when this nation and its literature were rising to unparalleled worldwide importance. Before copyright laws came into being in the late 1890s, magazines in Britain were beginning to steal as much from American magazines as we had long been stealing from the British. Several things happened at once to make editors and readers grow interested in settings and spoken language, including the broad popularity of authors such as Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, whose fiction partook intensely of cultural environments, whether of the working poor or criminal class in London or life on the Mississippi or in the American West. During the 1880s and '90s, that interest went so far as to include a fascination with "hearing" the way people spoke in different environments. Our literature in general—not just the Local Color Movement—showed what seemed like a natural desire to mend a country that had been torn apart by the Civil War. During the hottest period of Local Color, many of the stories in major American magazines were printed in almost unreadably dialectal spelling, suggesting a genuine fascination with the lyrical sound of place.

The movement also arose from the sheer enjoyment of language and phrasing and cultural richness in a nation that now had rail lines, a well-established mail service, newspapers, and magazines. The United States was finally unified enough to relish its own variety. Some recent critics, such as Brad Evans and Amy Kaplan, believe that local color writing was anything but a mournful yearning for a "pure" or lost preindustrial past. They believe that it showed an appreciation of our messy complexity as well as an urge toward reunification of the country.

Two of my favorite local color writers are Ellen Glasgow and Kate Chopin. Glasgow was a realist and a feminist of the early twentieth century. Her novel Barren Ground (1925), describes the hard life of Dorinda Oakley, daughter of a failing farmer in Virginia, who becomes pregnant but then leaves a doomed relationship and goes to New York, where she studies scientific agriculture. She comes back to her property in Virginia and turns it into a modern and successful dairy farm, only to suffer through a chain of struggles, including an ill mother and bad second marriage. It's a starkly realistic novel about an independent, strong, productive woman who works to turn her place of origin into a success story but for whom life remains an unforgiving challenge. Kate Chopin was another writer whose fiction was associated with both the South and the Local Colorists. Originally from St. Louis, Chopin moved to New Orleans, where she began specializing in dialectal stories about Southern life. Also like Glasgow, Chopin had a strong urge toward realism, particularly regarding sexuality and the oppressive politesse of "ladylike" behavior and motherhood. The Awakening (1899), set in the Creole culture of New Orleans and Grande Isle, was so far ahead of its time regarding a woman's independence and sexuality that it was widely condemned, forcing Chopin to turn back entirely to writing short stories.

Local color in fact reaches through the last century all the way to the present through writers such as William Faulkner, Charles Portis, Eudora Welty, and Richard Ford. Faulkner in fact grew tired of the appetite of magazines in the 1930s for local color, expressing in letters to friends that he was sick of being curious and quaint and "Southern," but after he had achieved fame and recognition in the 1940s, he went back to these subjects in some of his best late books, including The Hamlet.

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This issue's darkly comic story by Kim Coleman Foote, "How to Kill Gra' Coleman and Live to Tell about It (Vauxhall, NJ, c. 1949)," depicts a harsh African American matriarch who is tasked with raising her grandchildren. Angry at the abuse they receive from her, her grandchildren decide to poison her. But this woman hasn't achieved her place as...