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What Do I Read Next?
(Short Stories for Students)
The stories in Faulkner's The Hamlet form a cycle of tales dealing with the Sartoris and Snopes families, tracing their intertwinings and degenerations from the time of Abner Snopes to the early twentieth century.
Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931) is a novel of irrationality and violence that has been criticized for exploiting the violence that ‘‘Barn Burning’’ seems to condemn. Written as a potboiler, Sanctuary will also give a sense of Faulkner's more commercial side.
Like Faulkner, H. P. Lovecraft was an agrarian anti-modernist who took a keen and almost obsessive interest in the phenomenon of degeneration. Lovecraft's ‘‘Shadow over Innsmouth’’ (1936) is a story of inbreeding, isolation, and violence in a small New England town. Lovecraft's ‘‘Whisperer in Darkness’’ and ''The Dunwich Horror'' make use of a fictional American region, Arkham County, in Massachusetts, which has many points in common with Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. These stories appear in Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and Others.
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) deals with the moral and emotional growth of a young girl in Alabama. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, To Kill a Mockingbird is regarded as an excellent example of Southern regionalism.
The California poet Robinson Jeffers wrote narrative verse which explores nineteenth-century California in much the same manner as Faulkner explores the nineteenth and early twentieth-century South. Jeffers's ‘‘The Roan Stallion,’’ in Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, is a strong example of regionalism used to convey a universal vision.