Okay Nancy, do you consider John Grisham a southern writer? And while I'd agree that Capote was a southern writer would you call In Cold Blood southern literature?

"A Time to Kill," Grisham's first novel, is most definitely a Southern novel. It focuses on family and racial tensions in a Southern town. The title itself is a biblical allusion.

"In Cold Blood" is the only thing of Capote's that I've read, which is not a Southern novel, by my definition. It's widely seen as the first true crime novel, and reflects the conflicting morals and moods of the Midwestern town it's set in and the men who murdered a local family. I'll be able to speak more intelligently about Capote's genre once I've read his short stories, I suppose.

Nancy, I couldn't agree more. Poe is NOT a Southern writer. He's a Philadelphia writer.

Philly Poe Guy

OK, I tried to give it a day to calm down, but no dice. As someone who went to the Poe Museum in Richmond for field trips nearly every year, any claim that Poe is not a southern writer just gets my dander up. At any rate, here's my proof:

Using your criteria for a Southern writer, Poe is a Southern writer, considering he was "brought up in the South" -- from his mother's death at age 2, he was adopted by a Richmond family, went to school at the University of Virginia, and even returned to Virginia as an editor for the Southern Literary Messenger. Yes, he was born in Boston, but his formative years were hardly in the north.

And, yes, he rarely explicitly wrote about the south, as Dave pointed out, there's often "a deep sense of loss permeating" Southern works of literature. Poe's works and sense of loss go together like biscuits and gravy, like Southern folks and sweet tea.

I also ran across an interesting argument, by a Vanderbilt English professor, for qualifying Poe as a Southern writer:
As Ellen Glasgow argues in A Certain Measure, Poe's literary techniques are identifiably Southern: "Poe is, to a large extent, a distillation of the Southerner," she writes. "The formalism of his tone, the classical element in his poetry and in many of his stories, the drift toward rhetoric, the aloof and elusive intensity, all these qualities are Southern." Poe could also be saved through his criticism, much of which was published in an identifiable locale, the Southern Literary Messenger. Edwin Mims and Bruce Payne, for instance, state in their Southern Prose and Poetry for Schools that "[i]t is in his critical writing that Poe's Southern bent of mind was most notably evinced." Moreover, Poe's gothic form could make him a forerunner to the Southern Renaissance (Faulkner, O'Connor, etc.), and, hence, make him the ancestor of Southern literature's "true" flowering.

So, take that, Dave and Nancy! I think I'm done. For now. :)

I entirely disagree. "Southern" as a literary genre and "Southern" as a regional identifier are two different things, and your argument is flawed in both respects (and in conflating the two). First, regionally, he's a Richmonder. His family's from Richmond, he spent his formative years there, and middle Virginia is officially and undoubtedly Southern. And second, I don't see how gore and mystery aren't part of the Southern genre, and furthermore, I resent the existance of regional genres anyway. What makes a writer "Southern" is being from the South, and Poe was.

And I'll add: He's buried here, and many people consider Baltimore part of the South. New debate!

Maryann's comment that Poe's "formative years" were spent in Richmond is interesting. Poe spent five years of his childhood in a British boarding school when his foster family lived in England. That also would have had an affect on his "formation." I agree that most of his regional formation is Southern. Poe considered himself a Southern gentleman. However, his gypsy-like life brought him into so many regions of the US that he really never felt at home anywhere. He also called himself a Bostonian on more than one occasion.

As a writer, though, Poe achieved his greatest success while living in Philadelphia. Almost all of his greatest works were written in Philly and in several letters, when Poe lists his own best works, they are always works written while in Philly. Philadelphia, more than any other city, gave him the inspiration and environment that allowed his genius to blossom. Poe's "formative" years as a writer, the years when he fully developed his genius, were nurtured by Philly.

Romanticizing death? Gothic tendencies? That's as Southern as kudzu, Goo Goo Clusters and and that creepy moss dripping from trees. And if that's not Poe, it's Ann Rice. I don't want to be the one to tell her that she's not a Southern writer. Might sick a vampire on me. (Then again, some might argue that New Orleans is not the South, but a place unto itself.)

Poe has long been considered a Southern writer. When I took a course on Southern Writers at NC State in 1981, one of our assignments was to choose one of Poe's works and identify the characteristics that qualified it as Southern literature. It was pretty easy to do.

The NY Times acknowledges the debate over Poe's rightful legacy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/us/06poe.html

The NY Times acknowledges the debate over Poe's rightful legacy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/us/06poe.html