In an essay for a 1968 issue of The Partisan Review, poet Calvin Israel recalls a chance meeting with William Faulkner in Washington Square Park in New York in 1956. The title of the article, ‘The Last Gentleman’, is suggestive of Walker Percy's 1966 novel of the same name and positions Faulkner as the last vestige of a southern literary aristocracy. Israel describes the ageing Nobel Laureate as ‘a quiet center of great activity’ amid the bustle of the city park. When Israel notices Faulkner's ‘detachment’ from people around them, he confronts the author about his controversial stated views on racial gradualism. Faulkner responds with the single word ‘Violence’ before abruptly ending the encounter. Israel underscores Faulkner's legacy as it was understood in the late 1960s: he is made redolent of a lost tradition and epitomises a failure to act against racial segregation.

Coincidentally, Israel's memoir of Faulkner is preceded in the same edition of The Partisan Review by ‘An Appeal’ issued by John Young, Chairman of the Boston chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Young's letter makes a plea for aid to ‘Negroes in rural Mississippi areas subsisting partially on grass, and begging for food and / or money at Civil Rights headquarters in their various localities’. Poverty and hunger are presented as facts of life in the ‘various localities’ of typical southern towns. Young's emphasis on how a clear and present threat to black life exists ‘not in some economically backward country … [but] in the United States of America, the richest country on Earth’ throws Faulkner's anachronistic gradualism into relief. Young's and Israel's very different pieces of writing represent two voices in the discourse of race in the South at the end of the 1960s. The same issue's main feature, a symposium of black and white intellectuals on the topic of Black Power, represents still more voices. Included in the (all-men) group of black and white activists are Ivanhoe Donaldson and Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer and Nathan Wright Jr. and New York–born African American novelist William Melvin Kelley.

Rachel Carson's pivotal book on ecology, Silent Spring (1962), was published in the same year as William Faulkner's final novel and William Melvin Kelley's first. Carson opens the text with a self-described ‘fable’ of American life:

Carson goes on to describe the ‘strange blight’ that ‘crept over the area’ and how ‘Some evil spell had settled on the community’. Carson ends her opening chapter, titled ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’, with an admission that she has constructed a synecdoche: ‘This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe.’ Carson chooses not to describe a real town that has suffered from unsustainable industrial practices because her point is better served by an amalgamated, representative construct. Carson puts her scientific fiction of an archetypal town to use as a warning to take action on ecological stewardship: ‘this imagined tragedy may easily become stark reality we all shall know.’ Carson was successful in instigating the change she wanted to effect with her writing, and Silent Spring led to the institution of bans on certain harmful pesticides for use in American farming. Crucial to Carson's extended metaphor of the town is the agricultural landscape that surrounds it. Silent Spring reflects on the inherent connectedness of the semi-urban community space of the small town and the agricultural industry that, literally and figuratively, feeds it.

Each of the towns I have mapped in Living Jim Crow is the centre of activity for a wider rural, agricultural economy. As sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote in 1927, the American ‘country town’ exists in a symbiotic relationship to the neighbouring countryside:

On 27 May 1961 Lillian Smith received a telegram from James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), urging her to attend an ‘emergency meeting of [the] CORE advisory committee’ in New York. Farmer requested Smith's ‘immediate advice and help’ because the Freedom Rides were at ‘a decisive stage’. Three years later, shortly before the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Smith received another telegram, this one from President Lyndon B. Johnson, informing her that he would be establishing a ‘community relations service [to] assist communities in preventing and resolving racial disputes’. Johnson asks Smith to join, writing: ‘I urge you as a private citizen to use your leadership in the meantime to prom[o]te a spirit of acceptance and observance in your own community and business area.’ In pencil, on the reverse of Johnson's telegram, Smith drafted a response indicating that she would be ‘honored’ to serve in such a capacity and that she would do all she could ‘as a citizen and a writer to help’. What emerges from this correspondence is an image of Smith as repeatedly called upon to offer a practical contribution to the movement in the early 1960s. That Smith considered her efforts to relate to the roles of ‘citizen and writer’ begins to suggest how the novelist, memoirist and journalist understood her written output to be an extension of her moral and practical commitment to desegregation.

This commitment to activism and writing is anticipated in the novel through which Smith rose to national prominence, the controversial and popular Strange Fruit (1944). Within a month of its publication, 140,000 copies were in print and within ten months the novel had sold almost half a million copies, figures that Lawrence P. Jackson identifies as ‘blockbuster statistics’. Indeed, it was the number-one fiction bestseller of the year. Along with high sales figures came more than a little notoriety; Smith's indictment of the South's segregated system meant the novel was banned in Boston on 20 March 1944, from the mail by the Post Office Department in May, and unofficially in Detroit by ‘gentleman's agreement’. In her later non-fiction writing, Smith was vocal in seeking an immediate and uncompromising end to segregation, rather than a gradual decline.

Driving along US Route 19 between the Neels Gap mountain pass and the small north Georgia town of Blairsville, a traveller would pass through a stretch of road that was named the Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Highway in 2005. Reaching Blairsville, the same traveller could visit Reece's home on a nearby farm, a state heritage site, to walk a trail through the beautiful surroundings and purchase Appalachian crafts in the gift shop. Despite this evidence suggesting that the novelist and poet is remembered as an icon of northern Georgia's cultural heritage, Reece's work has had little place in southern literary studies. Literary critics rarely turn to him as a significant southern poet, let alone as a novelist. The abiding image that has so far formed of Reece is that of a rustic mountain bard, whose writing is somehow ‘authentically’ simple. Many of the mistakes made in reading and remembering Reece are parallel to the mistakes made in considering southern Appalachia, and this chapter offers a corrective to each of these misconceptions. The focus of this chapter, Reece's second novel, The Hawk and the Sun (1955), is a complex indictment of racial violence in the life of the fictional town of Tilden, Georgia, on the day in which the white community bands together to lynch the town's last African American resident.

Despite its critical neglect, the novel is a sophisticated anti-racist text that builds on wide and cosmopolitan influences, and is deeply engaged with Reece's contemporary moment. My reading complements and extends a body of scholarship in Appalachian Studies that reads the region as racially and politically diverse as a corrective to marginalising narratives of the mountain South. As literary critic Rodger Cunningham argues, the Appalachian mountain range holds a precarious geographical and ideological position in the United States as it is ‘not only an internal Other to the South as the South is the internal Other of America, but it is also the occupier of a simultaneous gap and overlap between North and South’. By reading Reece's exploration of racial segregation through a typology of the southern town, I argue that he is an author who is both experimental and engaged with contemporary racial politics. Locating Reece in this way contributes to a growing scholarly understanding of southern Appalachia.

On 14 June 1962 William Faulkner's publisher at Random House, Bennett Cerf, received a letter from entertainment lawyer Benjamin Aslan. Aslan was keen to discuss the ‘musicalization of Mr. Faulkner's work’ The Reivers (1962), published earlier that month. The letter apparently followed a telephone conversation between Cerf and Aslan and negotiations for an adaptation were far enough along for Aslan to enclose copies of a proposed agreement. Faulkner was, to judge from Cerf 's response, amenable to the suggestion. It seems likely that the adaptation would have gone ahead had the author not died following a horse-riding accident less than three weeks later on 6 July 1962. The Nobel laureate's fiction does not, at first glance, seem appropriate subject matter for musical theatre, and it is difficult to imagine another of his novels being ‘musicalised’.

Faulkner's final novel has long been understood, thanks in part to the intervention of the author, as a more easily digestible and humorous work by an otherwise ‘difficult’ modernist. In contrast, I argue that The Reivers is a complex and ironic indictment of backward-looking white supremacist narratives of southern history. By the early 1960s the typology of the fictional southern town that Faulkner had been exploring in the Yoknapatawpha cycle for decades had become a metafictional device through which an attentive reader could interrogate the reliability of a narrator. In particular, Faulkner depicts Jefferson's courthouse square, the centre of the town's social and physical landscape, as a contested space that defines the collective identity of the town.

The novel tells two stories. One, favoured by earlier and traditional Faulkner critics, is an adventure yarn about a young white boy who steals a car, loses it and tries to win it back in a horse race. The boy, Lucius Priest, is joined by Boon Hogganbeck, who featured in the earlier novel Go Down, Moses (1942), and Ned McCaslin, a member of the African American branch of the McCaslin family explored in the same novel. This story, I argue, serves to obscure a more insidious and politically reactionary narrative. Through a framing device, the phrase ‘Grandfather said’ with which the novel opens, Faulkner makes it clear that the adventure is being related by an elderly Priest to his grandson.

Robert Penn Warren regretted writing ‘The Briar Patch’, his contribution to the southern agrarians’ manifesto I’ll Take my Stand (1930). As the poet, novelist and critic's politics developed through the middle decades of the twentieth century, he shifted from the implicitly white supremacist, reactionary ideology of the agrarians towards racial liberalism. By the 1950s, and the publication of Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South (1956), Warren offered an intellectual contribution to civil rights activism. His collection of interviews with civil rights activists, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), included a frank rejection of the earlier essay: ‘… even then, thirty-five years ago, I uncomfortably suspected […] that no segregation was, in the end, humane. But it never crossed my mind that anybody could do anything about it.’ Nevertheless, when the younger Warren, the reactionary agrarian, declared that ‘The Southern Negro has always been a creature of the small town and farm. That is where he still chiefly belongs, by temperament and capacity’, he was describing two complementary, if inadvertent, fictions. The first fiction positions the small southern town as an archetype: a discrete, representative unit of community and space. The figure of the town that Warren constructs stands as an integer that is at once recognisable and resistant to specificity. The second fiction relates to the system of racial etiquette through which such towns operated. Warren implies that this system of ‘appropriate behaviour’ is both a natural offshoot of African Americans’ essentialist ‘temperament and capacity’, and that it is beneficial, contributing to a sense of ‘belonging’. But southern towns were not stable integers awaiting objective study; nor was racial etiquette either natural or beneficial.

Warren was not unique among his contemporary intellectuals. The 1930s saw a crystallisation of these two narratives, as put forward in discourses from both the social sciences and the humanities. The former thrived through an unprecedented turning inward of American anthropology and ethnography: pivotal works by John Dollard, Helen Merrell Lynd and Robert Staughton Lynd, and Hortense Powdermaker invented fictions of the typical American and southern towns.

One of Carson McCullers's earliest short stories, published posthumously as ‘Untitled Piece’ in The Mortgaged Heart (1972), rehearses some of the characters and scenarios that would form the basis of the author's first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940). In the story, a white man named Andrew Leander arrives, drunk and aimless, in a small southern town. Leander emerges at the railway station restaurant ‘in a drunken turmoil’, and bears more than a passing resemblance to Jake Blount in McCullers's later novel. In the story's closing dialogue, Leander approaches a young boy working in the restaurant, uncertain where he has found himself: ‘I got off the bus half drunk. Will you tell me the name of this place?’ If Leander gets an answer, it is not reported in the story. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, too, the small town setting is not named, nor is the small-town setting in any of McCullers's subsequent long works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946) or ‘The Ballad of the Sad Café’ (1952). Ostensibly, these texts share similarities of setting and of theme, but are set in distinct, separate archetypal southern towns. To the contrary, I argue that McCullers's novels are best understood as components in a narrative cycle that is made coherent by a shared setting in or around the fictional town of Milan, Georgia. Her final novel, Clock Without Hands (1961), makes these connections legible and acts as a capstone to what I term the ‘Milan Cycle’.

The novel centres on the lives of four southern men and culminates with the announcement of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka on 17 May 1954. The four men– J. T. Malone, Sherman Pew, Jester Clane and Fox Clane – represent various points on the town's spectrum of racial politics. These characters represent the final stages in a political trajectory in Milan that McCullers begins charting in her earliest published fiction. Milan is only named in the novel that most overtly engages with the region's real history of civil rights activism. I argue that the symbiotic relationship between McCullers's cycle and the black freedom struggle is necessary to make sense of the cycle as a cycle. Milan, in short, can only be named when it is seen alongside an extended narrative of anti-racist activism.

Immediately following the opening credits of Frank Capra's 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life, a close-up shot of a street sign informs the imagined viewer ‘You are Now in Bedford Falls’. The sign is a visual symbol of inclusion in an archetypal small American town. A montage of Bedford Falls’ institutions follows this shot, including a pharmacy, a bank and a boarding house, while the voice of each proprietor is heard petitioning God for mercy for George Bailey, played by James Stewart. In these images, Capra presents a typology of the American town, suggesting that Bedford Falls (and, later, its perverse mirror image, Pottersville) is socially integral and economically effective because the community and its infrastructure of buildings and services operate seamlessly.

The litany of the town's offices that Capra presents suggests a model for reading cultural representations of the American town. It's a Wonderful Life depicts a supposedly typical American town in the immediate post-war period as the site of personal difficulties (the plot's catalyst is Bailey's decision to commit suicide) that can be overcome through the successful cooperation of each of the town's inhabitants and the spaces they occupy personally and professionally. Racial segregation remains just out of view in Capra's film. Bailey's peregrinations through Bedford Falls and Pottersville bring him to working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods but never to the section of town where, presumably, Bailey's African American housekeeper Annie lives. While this mid-century American town is not innocent of racism or racial segregation, its creators can turn away from racism as a structuring principle in small-town space and society. In cultural representations of the United States South from the 1940s to the early 1960s, racial segregation is not only a foundational component of the typical town but also the central prism through which artists enact social critique. In amplifying the role of the town as both setting and mode of critique, Living Jim Crow: The Segregated Town in Mid-Century Southern Fiction models a critical practice for recognising and articulating the role of aesthetics in racial protest.

In this book, I identify and outline a typology of the fictional southern town specific to mid-century writing emerging from and concerned with the US South. The typology I reveal is different from Capra's American archetype because it is governed by the legal and structural frameworks of de jure racial segregation.