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.
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Black authors, along with visual artists, musicians, designers, and activists, have long learned to zip into the cloak of art we now call Afrofuturism to imagine possible futures that embrace truly liberated Black bodies and stories. Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, an anthology edited by Memphis native Jesse J. Holland, joins this tradition through multiple perspectives on the world of Marvel’s T’Challa.
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.
