Stark Young (1881–1963)

I am astounded that this book was a best-seller. I note that the contemporary movie version is very different. Granted the first half of the novel is a finely-written evocation of Life in the Olde South, full of beautiful descriptions of flowers in silver urns and ladies taking tea from Meissen china. But the book is essentially plot-free, although conversation contains a wealth of anecdote I suspect to be part of the Young family heritage. Then comes war, and the damn Yankees steal the show more silver and break the china, and the South falls into the hands of the worst kind of darkies and white trash. The last sixty pages are almost entirely thinly-disguised political diatribe. But the author consistently rejects hate and bitterness, which is presented as a betrayal of the Lost Cause. A book of complicated characters, with complicated emotions, but it is hard for a contemporary reader to see it as the “expulsion from Eden” story that the author intended. The portrayal of the black characters is of course unselfconsciously racist. show less