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Louis B. Rubin Jr. 
GOOD WRITERS--like grapes and overdrafts at the bank--usually come in bunches. When there is one, there are likely to be others turning up about the place. Anyone familiar with literary history knows this; there is something cyclical about it. I say "about the place" because, in the United States at least, place seems to have something to do with it. New England in the 1830s and 1840s, Chicago and the Midwest after the turn of the twentieth century, Mississippi in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s--these locales, although certainly not the only places where good writers have turned up, all seemed for a while to be sprouting authors like some gardens grow asparagus, which is to say, in luxuriant profusion. I advance this oft-remarked observation about writing and writers because there seems to have been a similar phenomenon taking place in the state of North Carolina during the past ten years or so, and I am sometimes asked to account for it. Why North Carolina, and why just now? Generalizations about such matters are easy to make. When it comes to accounting for the advent or excellence of this particular writer or that, they are a dubious business. Why one person chooses to become a writer rather than follow another trade is a complex matter. Someone once asked Flannery O´Conner why she wrote, and she replied, "because I´m good at it," which though true scarcely explains things. But when a particular locale, not hitherto notable for its literary fecundity, abruptly begins producing a remarkable number of gifted novelists, inevitably one begins looking at the time and place for explanation. The undeniable fact is that commencing sometime during the mid-to-late 1970s, this is what has happened in the state of North Carolina. It is not that there weren´t any good North Carolina novelists before then, for assuredly there were--Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell, Doris Betts, Sylvia Wilkinson, John Ehle, to cite a few. But consider the writers of fiction who have come along during the past fifteen years--Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Anne Tyler, Tim McLaurin, Kaye Gibbons, Gail Godwin, Randall Kenan, T.R. Pearson and Allan Gurganus among others. I have seen various explanations advanced for this literary explosion. One is the presence, on campuses such as the Universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Greensboro and at Duke University, of active writing programs which have offered instruction and encouragement to talented young people. This is true--but throughout the South and the nation there are many universities with active writing programs. The novelist Doris Betts, a first-rate teacher herself and one who studied with several very good writing teachers, has been quoted as saying that there has been a kind of "avalanche effect" which results when "lots of good, professional writers teach selflessly." Again quite true--but hardly a situation unique to North Carolina. Moreover, if one looks at a similar Southern literary flowering, that of the state of Mississippi, no such university stimulus was present, and it was certainly not the presence of professional writers and active writing programs on the local scene during the period between and after the two world wars that figured importantly in the development of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Spencer, and Walker Percy. I have heard it suggested that the publishing house that Shannon Ravenel and I formed in 1982, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, played a key role in bringing about the literary explosion of North Carolina writers. But surely that explanation confuses cause and effect; it is much more likely that the same situation that produced the writers in question also produced the publishing house that introduced some of them. Besides, Algonquin Books was but one of a number of small literary publishing houses that sprang up throughout the South and the country in response to the ever-increasing commercialism and mass-market orientation of the metropolitan book publishing industry. What, then, is responsible? I only wish I knew, but I don´t, and neither does anybody else. Still, I want to advocate a couple of observations. One of the great themes of the writers of the American South during the early and middle decades of our century was that of the decline and fall of the Old South of plantations, First Families, and aristocratic grandeur, together with a rueful investigation of the price paid in toil and tears that made that grandeur possible. It was a magnificent theme, and made possible some memorable fiction. But from the day of Thomas Wolfe onward, it has never constituted an important motif in North Carolina writing. For, interestingly enough, in pre-Civil War times North Carolina was not importantly a plantation state. On the contrary, it was mainly a community of small farmers--yeomen farmers, as W.J. Cash called them in The Mind of the South. Unlike North Carolina´s neighbors to the north and south, Virginia and South Carolina, it was never under the domination of the planter class, either politically or socially. Although the state was a leader in the coming of the factories during the New South period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and although it showed itself quick to respond to industrialization, it remained largely agricultural, and small-farm at that, well into the mid-20th century. It developed no large cities; there were no real equivalents to Richmond, Norfolk, Atlanta, Birmingham, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, and so on. Its cities remained small, and its people generally lived in small towns. The patterns of community life continued relatively unchanged, without--among the white inhabitants at least--great extremes of wealth, highly stratified class distinctions, or dynastic pretensions. (Exception, perhaps certain of the mill towns of the Piedmont.) The real change took place only after World War II. It was not until then that modernity, with all that it involved and involves, truly began to disrupt the patterns of community life in the small cities, towns and countryside of North Carolina. When it did arrive, it came with tremendous rapidity. One need only look at photographs of the main streets of the towns and villages of the state during the Depression years, and compare these with the present-day scene, to glimpse the enormity of the change. What I find interesting is that of the writers noted earlier, whose novels have been the subject of so much attention during the last ten or fifteen years, all but one or two of them grew up in small towns and on farms--but they no longer live there. Instead, they make their homes in or near university towns and cities, and some now reside in the cities of the Northeast. Now, if what helps to make writers, of whom there is always a plentiful supply, into important writers is the availability, within their lives and in their own experience, of striking social and moral disruption and contrast, so that the drama of human change and resistance to change assumes formidable imaginative proportions, are not these writers amply provided with it? What more powerful impetus to searching for underlying order and patterns in everday existence through the telling of stories could be found than in what these writers now perceive around and within them, and what they left behind? I think, for example, of the writers whose work I know best. Jill McCorkle grew up in the town of Lumberton during the years when the main Northeast-to-Florida artery, Interstate Highway 95, was built through what until then had been a small, relatively- impoverished community. She was educated at Chapel Hill and Hollins College, and she now lives outside Boston, Massachusetts, and teaches at Harvard University, which is a long way from a small town on the Lumber River in southeastern North Carolina. Clyde Edgerton grew up in the semi-rural area known as Bethesda, which is now a part of the city of Durham. He was educated at Chapel Hill, served in the Air Force in Viet Nam, and has taught in several colleges and universities. Kaye Gibbons grew up in dire poverty on a rundown farm near Rocky Mount. She went to school at Chapel Hill and at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she has been artist-in-residence at the university library. All three of these novelists have chosen to set their fiction in small towns and farms, and to write about people few of whom have college degrees or frequent sophisticated circles. Yet they see these people not only from the perspective of their own youthful experience among them, but equally from the vantage point of the distance they have traveled since then, a distance which is not only geographical but social, cultural and even religious as well. The same is true of all the others. They write their stories about ordinary people, but they invest that seemingly ordinary everyday life with the excitement, humor, pathos and drama that can make what they do and think striking and extraordinary. For they are able to perceive the human significance that lies within and beneath that daily life, since it is within themselves and their own lives as well. I do not offer these observations, tentative and largely unshaped as they are, as an explanation for the burst of creativity that has been going on in North Carolina. There are so many other factors involved; and besides, each of these writers is very much an individual case, and the books each has written are greatly different from those of their contemporaries. All the same, they do come from within the boundaries of a single American state, and at approximately the same time in the history and life of that state. That this is no more than a coincidence, I very much doubt.
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