The Books of the States: North Carolina (15 electoral votes; Guest: Randall Kenan)

Thanks to Brad for shouldering the biggest and most thankless task of trimming the countless fine books from the Empire State down to a tidy 31 (I'll have to lobby him further to find a place for Ben Katchor in the starting lineup). And thanks to Randall Kenan for today's labor of love: a wonderful tour of the Tar Heel State through 15 of its books and writers that I imagine Weiland and Wilsey would have accepted as a fine North Carolina essay for State by State if Kenan had chosen to submit it.

Instead, he wrote about hogs. Here's a rather mouth-watering passage from his State by State essay:

I am as partisan as they come and do not apologize to any man, woman, or child. The best barbecue in the world comes from North Carolina. And not just from anywhere in North Carolina: from the eastern part of the state.
    I make no apologies, therefore, in stating with great emphatic zeal and extreme prejudice that a hog should be cooked over a pit, over choice wood, for at least half a day, preferably twice that long. Whole. The tender meat should then be disarticulated from the bones, skin and all, which, in this case, will be a cakewalk as the flesh has been rendered into a state of tender, moist, near-gelatinous compliance, the smell of which should cause mild hallucinations. Next the cooked meat should be chopped--not pulled, plucked, sliced, or otherwise mishandled--chopped. Then it should be mixed with a vinegar-based solution of such clarity and spiciness as to augment but not detract from the suzerainty of slowly roasted hog flesh. The beast gave up its life for your delectation. That should be honored.

It's not all delicious: there is much talk in the piece of industrial hog poop and also hog sex. As he says, you should take the hog whole.

Kenan was raised in Chinquapin, North Carolina (needless to say, in the eastern part of the state), and after years in New York and elsewhere, he has returned to teach in Chapel Hill at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina. After his debut novel, A Visitation of Spirits, he made a splash (and first came to my awareness) with the very modern folk tales of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. More recently he's written Walking on Water, a deeply personal survey of what it means to be black in America, and The Fire This Time, a post-Katrina update of James Baldwin's classic civil-rights-era book.

Here are his picks to represent North Carolina:

• Collected Poems: 1951-1971 by A.R. Ammons: Two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, a MacArthur "Genius" grant -- yeah, yeah, big deal. Who cares?  Before his death in 2001 all the people who knew their poetry and who could be intimidating and arch about the increasingly arcane -- alas –- world of poetry, would point to Archie Ammons as one of the great AMERICAN poets of the 20th Century. I'm astonished by how often he is left off the list of great Southern writers, as if one can't be both at the same time. Raised on a tobacco farm and educated at Wake Forest University (in biology) and for a time a teacher on the Outer Banks, he is quintessentially a Tar Heel. His work tends toward the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, and like the Walden Pond dude, Ammons returns often to the wild land of his childhood, to talking crows and tobacco barns and the white spires of Protestant religion, and more, so much more. Garbage (1993) is the magnum opus -- and a pure delight to read. But one would do well to treat one’s self to Collected Poems:1951-1971 or the briefer Selected Poems done for the Library of America.
• Entering Ephesus by Daphne Athas: North Carolinians think of Chapel Hill the way Californians think of Berkley, or Wisconsians think of Madison -- they're not like the rest of us, but they are ours. Overwhelmed by massive land-grant universities, reputed hotbeds of liberalism and "alternative" lifestyles, state legislatures love to beat up on these villages when the budgets get tight, and sing their praises when the basketball team wins. If there is one book that tells it like it is about Chapel Hill, North Carolina, it is Daphne Athas's luminous 1971 novel, Entering Ephesus. Like Thomas Wolfe's Pulpit Hill, Athas's Ephesus is a stand-in for the tiny university town. But more, Athas –- who was transplanted to NC from Massachusetts in 1939 as a little girl -– casts her net wide and deals not only with the Ivory Tower and all the colorful social and intellectual in habitués, but also with the life of Niggertown, the local mill town where all the workers with true backbone lived. A pure joy to read.
• Beast of the Southern Wild by Doris Betts. Not only a writer of prose fiction, but something of a firebrand and social and literary paragon, Betts has long been a favorite of North Carolingians. Her novels cover a great deal of territory, from the mills of the piedmont to the Donner Party and the Nevada desert to children suffering with chronic illness -- she contains multitudes. Her short stories also, very like her contemporary, Alice Munro, are worlds in miniature. 1973's Beasts of the Southern Wild remains one of her most read, and adapted (spawning an Academy Award-winning short film and an off-Broadway musical, "The Ugliest Pilgrim" into Violet, 1981, and Violet, 1998).

• The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash. It is sad and astonishing to think that W.J. Cash died at the relatively tender age of 41, under mysterious circumstances in Mexico City in 1941. Reading The Mind of the South makes one wonder what else this astute and penetrating journalist, a kinder, gentler H.L. Mencken, might have produced. Cash's book -- this work of layman's sociology, history and firsthand accounts; an intellectual, penetrating tour of the South -- remains hauntingly relevant almost 70 years later. Still a wise choice for anyone wanting to understand the South.
• The Marrow of Tradition by Charles W. Chesnutt. It's important to note that before there was Thomas Wolfe, North Carolina had Charles W. Chesnutt, who was arguably, for a time, North Carolina's most famous literary product. Though he was born in Ohio, he grew up in Fayetteville, NC. His mixed race background would have made it easy for him to pass for white -- in the North at least. In truth, when he first started publishing stories in the Atlantic Monthly (stories that would be collected in the fantastic The Conjure Woman), he did not disabuse folk of his background, one way or the other. That is until certain critics pointed out the stories were too smart and artful to have been written by a black person. Chesnutt set the record straight in an important 1899 essay, "What is a White Man?" and even more forcefully in an article, "Post-Bellum -- Pre-Harlem" in 1931. His entire oeuvre is worth reading, but the most important work, without a doubt, is 1901's The Marrow of Tradition. The novel deals with the so-called Race Riots of 1898, when almost all black people were expelled from Wilmington, NC, by force of terror and lynching. Today most scholars point out that Chesnutt's account is far more accurate than most accounts written at the time. But the better idea, for the curious reader, is to begin with William A. Andrews' excellent, The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt, which contains the entire novel, and many of his stories and essays.
• Walking Across Egypt by Clyde Edgerton. It is easy to think of Clyde Edgerton as being merely a humorist -- because he is so damned funny. But beneath the rapid-fire, down-home, gut-level fun coils a mind like Bertrand Russell and a spiritual humanity like that of Thomas Merton. He has written a lot, all of it excellent (and funny), but the consensus seems to be that Walking Across Egypt, the story of 78-year-old Mattie Riggsbee and the orphan kid, Wesley Benfield, is the place to start if you haven't. Edgerton captures something so accurate about the essence of small town North Carolina life that, for this small town NC boy, to borrow from Associate Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart: It's hard to define, but I know it when I see it. And Clyde Edgerton gets it right.
• Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus. Comparisons to Eudora Welty and William Faulkner and James Joyce are not overblown with it comes to Gurganus. One is tempted to paraphrase Tina Turner and say, He's simply the best, but the work speaks for itself. His 1989 bestseller, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, was an instant classic, a tome of invention and virtuosic prose sustained throughout a chronicle covering more than 100 years. His short stories and novellas, in White People and The Practical Heart, are one masterwork after another.
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. A renowned scholar of the American slave narrative recently told me that Incidents the Life of a Slave Girl is perhaps the most widely read of all the slave narratives. Harriet Ann Jacobs was born into slavery in 1817 in Edenton, NC. She endured sexual abuse from her master ("Satan never had a truer follower") and later had an affair with a white man who would go on to become a senator. She escaped to the north in 1835 and worked as a nursemaid in New York during the Civil War. In today's parlance, the 1861 publication was huge. It remains hugely fascinating.
• Crash Diet by Jill McCorkle. And then there was Jill McCorkle... and nothing ever seemed to be the same again. This glamorous, small town woman from Lumberton, NC, hit the scene with not one, but two first novels, a rare feat. July 7th and The Cheer Leader introduced a humorous, bright, witheringly frank new voice on the scene, and McCorkle was a leader of the pack of a new Southern Renaissance taking place in the late 20th Century. Along with other Algonquin Books writers McCorkle injected an artery into the Southern literary circulatory system. The short story is where McCorkle shines like a comet. Someone who knows better than I told me Crash Diet was the book to pick, though I'm extremely partial to her last book, Creatures of Habit.
• Mary by Mary Mebane. When Mary Mebane's autobiography was published in 1981, it was overshadowed by books like The Color Purple and the rising star of Toni Morrison, who published Tar Baby in that same year. But Mary: An Autobiography is a simply and beautifully wrought account of growing up as a black child in the segregated South, as complex as it is hymn-like plain. An important work.
• Proud Shoes and Song in a Weary Throat, Pauli Murray. Murray's is one of those American stories presidential candidates would all do well to quote and emulate and remember. One of the architects of the latter days of the Civil Rights Movements, civil rights lawyer extraordinaire, and the first African American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest, her life story makes the word "inspirational" seem paltry. She was also a poet and a graceful writer of prose. Proud Shoes is the story of her early years growing up in Durham, on par with works like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Her posthumously published autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat, is not only an education and a revelation, but a down-right compelling story. The woman was a giant and everyone should know her name and read her words.
• Reynolds Price. This man does it all -- novels, short stories, plays, poetry, memoir, songs (he wrote a hit song for fellow North Carolinian, James Taylor, "Copperline.") His first book, 1962's A Long and Happy Life, the coming-of-age story of a young North Carolina woman, Rosacoke Mustian, is the book that put him on the national map. I find it very satisfying to read that first book along with its prequel, A Generous Man, and a story, "A Chain of Love," collected in one volume, Mustian (1983). But perhaps his most beloved is his memoir dealing with his bout with spinal cancer and paralysis and the long journey after, A Whole New Life (1994).
• Lee Smith. Like the current Democratic candidate for governor, Lt. Governor Beverley Perdue, Smith is a transplant from Virginia. In fact they are both from the same small town, Grundy.  Smith's output over the years has been prodigious. Many have pointed to Oral History, a marvelous novel about an Appalachian family (Owl Holler could be in NC or VA), as being her great novel. (My personal favorite is The Devil's Dream, about a musical family very like the great Carter family). But her latest, On Agate Hill, is perhaps the most NC of them all, set in 1872 on a plantation in the Civil War-devastated piedmont.
• Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor by Alec Wilkinson. Something of a sensation when it was originally published in The New Yorker, this glowing and gritty example of reportage made a celebrity –- and eventually movie star –- of Garland Bunting, the Halifax County, sheriff who kept the peace and rounded up the moonshiners. He puts the color in colorful. ("Take that, you snake chunker!")  At times funny, but always humane and deeply observed.
• Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. For writers Thomas Wolfe is to North Carolina what William Faulkner is to Mississippi. You can't get around him, or over him, or under him. He's a mountain, and was a mountain of a man, and his work is equally mountainous. This first novel is perhaps the best know and the most beloved. (He also gave us the phrase and the melancholy novel, You Can't Go Home Again). Wolfe's appeal has proven to be cyclical, but the scale of his achievement is hard to deny.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: First, too many poets have been left off, from Michael McFee to Betty Adcock to Gerald Barrax to James Applewhite and two state poet laureates: Fred Chappell (also an important novelist) and his student, Kathryn Stripling Byer. I'll probably go to hell for that. Then there are the novelists who've gained international acclaim: Kaye Gibbons, Robert Morgan, David Payne, Margaret Maron, Jan Karon, Charles Frazier, T.R. Pearson -- and what does one do with adopted son and daughter, Orson Scott Card and Maya Angelou? (Rarely, if ever, will you see these two names linked in the same sentence again). And lastly one of my favorites, Elizabeth Gilbert’s portrait of the strange, wonderful, amazing, bizarre, awe-inspiring Eustace Conway IV, a true man on the mountain, The Last American Man.

So many good writers, so many good books... This state suffers from an Embarrassment of Riches when it comes to writers.

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey