The books in this installment of the 50 Books / HT50 series are a varied lot — two novels, one nonfiction book, and two poetry collections, including a Pulitzer Prize winner. All the authors have strong ties to the South, however, and two are Tennessee natives.
Cormac McCarthy made his name and fame in the West, but his most enduring character was Knoxville river rat Cornelius Suttree.
The beginning of the 21st century brought Tennessee a new sports team, a rowdy anti-tax protest, and the publication of a controversial book.
Tennessee was connected to some exceptional literary achievements during the second half of the 1990s, including a Pulitzer Prize for poetry awarded to a native son and a legendary journalist’s acclaimed book about the extraordinary young civil rights activists who worked to end segregation in Nashville.
The third installment in our 50 Books / HT50 project features books from the first half of the 1990s, a period that saw the opening of the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, a record-breaking blizzard in East Tennessee, and the election of a Tennessean, Al Gore, to the vice presidency.
Steve Stern’s 2010 novel The Frozen Rabbi follows the travels and travails of a Jewish family and their extraordinary heirloom. Stern will appear at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 21-22.
