1001 More Things Everyone Should Know about the South

As a fiction writer, I used to complain that sociology was the academic discipline most opposite, in some cases even most inimical, to literature. After all, the average sociologist seemed to conduct boring surveys that led to obvious conclusions from which he could generalize about huge numbers of human beings--all of them imbedded in, rendered anonymous by, some undefined "society." That society so molded them that even "free choice" was only one more constraint imposed from outside by a social institution. Determinism ruled. By contrast, we novelists only hinted our tentative conclusions about human nature after depicting singular human beings in particular circumstances. Their free choices spilled out all over the page. Deductive vs. inductive? In any case, my average sociologist, even if he had an interesting generalization to share, often obscured it in heavy prose, thick with jargon.

This oversimplification occurred before that straw-man sociologist was replaced on my writer's black list by Professor Doctrinaire Literary Theorist, whose prose was even worse. And it also occurred before I had redefined sociology after meeting--and reading--John Shelton Reed, who is not average in anything.

Reed is a writer himself, not merely a compiler of that type of self-evident data all individualists, especially southern individualists, can't wait to dispute. In one of his books, Reed pleads with fellow-sociologists to stop trying to "sound scientific" and instead summarize what they have learned in clear prose made accessible to the general reader. This same editorial approach is used at Southern Cultures, where the most erudite specialists are steadily encouraged to write in what Randall Jarrell once called "plain American that even dogs and cats can read."

Perhaps verbal skill was transmitted in the Reed genes. His sister is Lisa Alther, a Wellesley graduate who has written five novels and who, herself, has been pushing against rigid categories ever since in a fourth grade play she had to portray Miss Noun who was married by the preacher to Mr. Verb. This experience gave her a rebellious and immediate preference for stream-of-consciousness writing, just as her brother has steadily turned away from dry and pedantic prose to celebrating with clarity and wit the very characters who naturally interest us storytellers.

Aiming at a general audience, Reed and Alther once teamed up on the lecture circuit to present the American South as seen across two desks--that of the professor and that of the professional novelist. It proved to be the same fascinating and amusing South, where the usual regional social types (see Reed's Southern Folk, Plain and Fancy) exceeded media stereotypes--sometimes by choosing to mock and play games with the easy assumptions of outsiders. After all, one reason for painting your roadside sign to read BOILED PEENUTS is so travelers will stop their fast cars to correct your spelling and end up buying some, though they can barely conceal their smirks over the local usage of "poke" for "brown paper bag."

Nobody enjoys extending his tongue far into his cheek more than Reed, and few have such a reach; but one difference has been that he laughs with his southern neighbors more than at them. Though he grew up in east Tennessee, as an undergraduate at MIT Reed first found himself called upon to define how the South was distinctive, then to defend it. There, and later while earning his doctorate at Columbia, he looked back on his home region in a mood more akin to that of the Agrarians than Quentin Compson, but wittier than either. Even his titles reject the academic style with its obligatory colon--Kicking Back, Whistling Dixie, "My Tears Spoiled My Aim". In thirteen books Reed has, for instance, complained that northern menus give him indigestion, that he really dislikes eating "above the Rolaid line." One scholar noted that his sociology might be considered old-fashioned because it included social criticism. He has written...