Volume 17, Number 3 · September 2, 1971
Southern Discomfort
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Confessions of a White Racist
by Larry L. King
Viking, 173 pp., $5.95
Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town
by Willie Morris
Harper's Magazine Press, 192 pp., $5.95
The American South has always been treacherous to those who try to describe and explain it, and capture its reality. The finest writers in America have written fiction about it—many of them intentionally—but it traps its more earnest interpreters into using it as a kind of Thematic Apperception Test. It isn't so much that writers distort it as that they so easily select from it themes and issues that reveal their own concerns more clearly than they do its essence. Even Gunnar Myrdal's classic An American Dilemma did not help me much, when I read it, to understand my own homeland, although it certainly helped me, twenty-five years later, to understand Jan Myrdal's Confessions of a Disloyal European.
Review, 3528 words
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