50 Fun Facts About Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic fiction is set in which region of the United States?

It highlights violence and cruelty as features of the region's culture.

Which novelist critiqued the "Southern Gothic School" in 1935 as full of "aimless violence"?

Like the original term Gothic, the label began as an insult.

Which Mississippi writer said of the Southern Gothic label, "They better not call me that!"?

Her Jackson house is now a National Historic Landmark museum.

Unlike classic Gothic's barbaric past, Southern Gothic shows what persisting in the South?

The genre dismantles the romantic mythology of the antebellum South.

Which 19th-century humorist's grotesques are cited as early Gothic treatments of the South?

He was a doctor who wrote as Madison Tensas, the Louisiana Swamp Doctor.

Which Great Depression photographer's images are said to evoke Southern Gothic visually?

He said he understood why Southerners were haunted by their own landscape.

Surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin shot abandoned places mainly in which state?

He worked at it for nearly 40 years and was born in Lake Charles.

Which folk magic tradition is cited as a recurring Southern Gothic theme?

Derelict houses, old cemeteries and overgrown swamps are the genre's visual furniture.

Which Bruce Springsteen album was influenced by the stories of Flannery O'Connor?

He recorded it alone on a four-track in his bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey.

Which R.E.M. album, their third, displayed a Southern Gothic influence?

It was recorded in London with producer Joe Boyd, the band's first album made abroad.

Johnny Cash's gothic-country American Recordings series was produced by whom?

A producer best known for hip hop and metal, he had Cash cover Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails.

Which singer's music has been described as "Southern Gothic Pop"?

Born Hayden Anhedönia, she broke through with the 2022 album Preacher's Daughter.

J.D. Wilkes, who called Southern Gothic music grotesque and beautiful, fronts which band?

The Kentucky band formed in Murray in 1995 and mixes rockabilly, blues and punk.

Which fictional Mississippi county is the setting for most of William Faulkner's work?

It stands in for Lafayette County, with Oxford renamed Jefferson.

In what year did William Faulkner win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

The citation praised his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel.

What did Faulkner name the house he bought in Oxford, Mississippi?

Income from his short stories paid for it.

Faulkner's Southern Gothic novel As I Lay Dying follows which family's journey to bury their mother?

Addie wanted to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi.

In "A Rose for Emily", what is the name of the Northern labourer Emily is seen with around town?

The story appeared in The Forum in April 1930.

Faulkner's 1931 novel Sanctuary concerns the abduction of which college girl?

Faulkner called the book a potboiler, but it was his commercial breakthrough.

Which plantation owner's rise and fall is told by unreliable narrators in Absalom, Absalom!?

The 1936 novel spans the years before, during and after the Civil War.

Which Faulkner novel takes its title from a soliloquy in Macbeth?

It was the first book to feature the Compson family.

Light in August (1932) introduces which doomed drifter, partner of Lucas Burch?

The novel is classed as both Southern Gothic and modernist.

Carson McCullers published her Southern Gothic debut The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at what age?

It follows a deaf man named John Singer in a 1930s Georgia mill town.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter centres on John Singer, a man with what condition?

The lonely townsfolk of a 1930s mill town confide in him.

Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in which city?

She was born Lula Carson Smith, daughter of a jeweller.

McCullers's Member of the Wedding came from a "divine spark": Frankie is in love with whom?

The novel took her five years, interrupted to write The Ballad of the Sad Café.

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in which fictional Alabama town?

Scout narrates three Depression years there, 1933 to 1935.

Harper Lee based Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on which childhood friend?

Capote returned the favour, basing Idabel in Other Voices, Other Rooms on Lee.

The young author of In Cold Blood was raised by relatives in which Alabama town?

Harper Lee was his neighbour and best friend there.

Which Capote novel, his 1948 debut, featured a character based on Harper Lee?

Random House's Bennett Cerf signed him after the story "Miriam".

To Kill a Mockingbird draws on a childhood event near Harper Lee's hometown in what year?

The plot and characters are loosely based on her family and neighbours in Monroeville.

Who directed The Night of the Hunter, his sole directorial credit?

The 1955 film is now considered a defining work of Southern Gothic cinema.

Who played the preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles in The Night of the Hunter?

James Agee wrote the screenplay from Davis Grubb's 1953 novel.

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois moves into her sister's apartment in which city?

The shabby flat is in the French Quarter, rented by Stella and Stanley Kowalski.

Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is set in whose Mississippi Delta plantation home?

It won the 1955 Pulitzer for Drama and was Williams's personal favourite.

Tennessee Williams was born in which Mississippi town?

He was christened Thomas Lanier Williams III.

Suddenly Last Summer opened off-Broadway in 1958 on a double bill under what overall title?

Its Victorian Gothic mansion ties it to Southern Gothic literature.

Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre is about a dysfunctional farming family in which state?

Its sexual themes led New York's vice society to seek a court ban; it sold over 10 million copies.

Which Caldwell novel became a 1933 play that set a Broadway record for consecutive performances?

It and God's Little Acre rank among the best-selling American novels ever.

Cormac McCarthy's Child of God is set in which mountainous Tennessee county?

Lester Ballard is described as a child of God much like yourself perhaps.

Cormac McCarthy's family moved in 1937 to which Tennessee city, where his father worked for the TVA?

His early novels are Southern Gothic before he turned to Westerns and the post-apocalyptic.

McCarthy's 1968 novel Outer Dark, about a woman who bears her brother's child, is set where?

The time and place are left nebulous, around the turn of the twentieth century.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is subtitled A what Story?

John Berendt's book spent 216 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Who directed the 1997 film of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?

Several characters' names were changed to protect privacy.

James Dickey's 1970 novel Deliverance was filmed in 1972 by which director?

Dickey had only published poetry before his debut novel.

The Southern Gothic miniseries Sharp Objects sends reporter Camille Preaker back to which hometown?

Amy Adams starred in the 2018 HBO adaptation of Gillian Flynn's debut novel.

The 2005 film The Skeleton Key is set at a plantation home in which parish?

The New York Times said it indulged every Southern Gothic cliché.

James Agee's 1941 book on Alabama tenant farmers, with photographs, is titled what?

Fortune had sent them to Hale County in 1936 and then declined to run the story.

Which Flannery O'Connor stories does the genre page cite for villains disguised as innocents?

In both, a traveller exploits a farm family, blurring victim and villain.

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's 1952 Southern Gothic debut, follows a veteran who founds what?

Hazel Motes preaches the Church Without Christ from the hood of his car.