The Real Places That Gave Rise to Southern Fictions | The New Yorker

It is this kind of heftier noun which Tema Stauffer takes for her subject in “Southern Fiction,” a visual survey of the settings that shaped the imaginations of some of the last century’s most significant Southern writers. Stauffer’s pictures are not illustrations of particular literary works or portraits of individual writers but, rather, invocations of people and places, both real and imagined. Taken together, they capture the intellectual and aesthetic challenges posed by biography, but also by geography—and specifically by the American South.