Looking Back on 50 Years of Tennessee Books

We’ve reached the end of the 50 Books / HT 50 series. This final installment features two Pulitzer Prize winners, a book about a controversial figure in the Civil Rights Movement, a richly imagined historical novel set in Nashville, and an award-winning collection of essays about the South. There’s something a little sad about bringing the project to a close, knowing there are many worthy books that didn’t make the list. Nevertheless, we hope you’ve enjoyed this sampling of great Tennessee books and that it inspires you to return to old favorites or seek out unfamiliar and previously missed works. There’s so much to celebrate in Tennessee’s literary legacy.

Learn more about the 50 Books / HT50 project here and go here to see all the project posts, including six in-depth essays about selected titles.

The Overstory is the 12th novel by Richard Powers, who maintains a home in Townsend, Tennessee. The book, described by Barbara Kingsolver as “a gigantic fable of genuine truths held together by a connective tissue of tender exchange between fictional friends, lovers, parents and children,” won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Overstory is featured in a 50 Books / HT50 essay. (W.W. Norton, 2018)

Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers by Preston Lauterbach investigates the story of Withers, a Black Memphian who documented the Civil Rights Movement as well as the city’s music scene. After his death, evidence surfaced that he had worked as an F.B.I. informant. (W.W. Norton, 2019)

The Hot Wing King, a play by Memphis native Katori Hall, is set in Memphis and follows a gay couple and their friends as they navigate personal drama while preparing to enter a cooking competition. The play, which premiered in New York City on February 11. 2020, had its initial run cut short by the COVID pandemic. It won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky, the third novel by Margaret Verble, centers on a young Cherokee woman who performs at a 1920s Nashville zoo. Verble, who grew up in Nashville and is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, spins an elaborate tale rooted in history and America’s foundational injustices. (Mariner Books, 2021)

Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South by Nashvillian Margaret Renkl collects selected essays from her New York Times columns covering politics, family, the arts, and the environment. The book won the 2022 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and the 2022 Southern Book Prize. (Milkweed Editions, 2021)

"When science and art collide, a new and potent sense of awe can emerge. Powers traffics in that awe, and The Overstory’s fabulist strains wind up transforming the reader, too, much as the line from Ovid’s Metamorphosis promises. In the end, I felt as though I had inhabited the perspective of something non-human, something with a different sense of time and of life. Including the trees in my own backyard." ~ Lee Conell in Chapter16.org, November 28, 2018

"Like others who have confronted the Withers legacy, including those whose own activities were documented in FBI files stocked with Withers’s photos and reports, Lauterbach struggles to understand his subject’s inner conflicts and loyalties. An Army veteran, Withers was a conservative patriot who disapproved when the civil-rights movement took an anti-Vietnam War turn. Hints of communism among civil-rights activists disconcerted him and obsessed the FBI." ~ Peggy Burch in Chapter16.org, January 8, 2019

"What’s refreshing here is the matter-of-fact depiction of black gay characters who may be dissatisfied, to varying degrees, with their own behavior but not, ultimately, because of their sexuality. Watching Cordell and Dwayne casually snuggle and kiss, draping their bodies over each other, you sense a bond in which erotic attraction has segued into something both more relaxed and more complex. You don’t doubt that these men were meant to be together." ~ Ben Brantley in The New York Times, March 1, 2020 (Photo: Monique Carboni)

"When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky is a marvel, as Verble shifts villains and victims alike. There’s a sudden murder, which jolts the novel in a new direction. The present wobbles on its axis as the past rises up in accusation. To whom does the land around Nashville belong? And who gets the final, authoritative word on justice? These are among the vexing questions Verble probes in her enthralling book. It’s a testament to her generous vision that she never gives up hope." ~ Hamilton Cain in Chapter16.org, October 13, 2021

"Renkl provides a good introduction to the contemporary South and offers a corrective to some persistent oversimplifications. She succeeds in steering clear of our infamous national polarization by regarding the United States not, as some do, as an idea, an experiment, or some other such thing, but as a place. In this regard her approach is traditionally Southern, as is her habit of addressing particulars rather than generalizations. Almost everything she writes about begins with a local focus." ~ Richard Tillinghast in Chapter16.org, February 14, 2022

Humanities Tennessee is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Founded in 1973, we continue to develop ways to connect, learn, and grow as a community.

Tagged: 50 Books / HT50, Features