Southern Literature begins in 1607 and continues into the present. As all art forms change with time, Southern Literature also experiences these changes. After the civil war, the people of the South rebuilt their homes and tried to survive a different life. Struggling to make agriculture survive, the people search for a better way of life. They brought to he farmland's industrialization for more jobs and hopefully a fresh and an improved life. Upon arrival of industrialization in the South, the culture brings deconstruction. Deconstruction, an important event in the timeline, changes the face of southern literature. Known as the mother of southern literature, deconstruction arrives because literature of the South fails to express the real situation of the times. H. L. Mencken, a literary editor and probably the father of deconstruction, begins to challenge southern writers to create literature of significance. In Joseph M. Lora's essay about fiction in the 1920's, he quotes Mencken " The South has not only lost its old capacity for producing ideas; it has also taken on the worst intolerance of ignorance and stupidity." Offended, yet encouraged by Mencken's statement, writers begin to respond with new works important of these times in the South.

Because deconstruction occurs a new period of southern literature arrives, 'Southern Renaissance." What is Southern Renaissance? How did it evolve and how does it affect southern Literature today? A period from 1920 to 1950, Southern Renaissance increases significantly the quantity and the quality of work written about the southern region of the United States. After the devastation of the Civil War, the South lost every aspect of cultural activity. In order to regain the respect and prestige of the other regions in the United States, the writers of the South begin producing more notable literary works. These writers find meaning in the past and in the present for their work, and with the lowest social economic level in the United States, these growing writers of the South experience perfect seedlings for the creation of meaningful work. Their stories contain some themes of tragedy, animalistic fornication, incest, murder and racial tension. The settings reveal a particular region in the South, with the characters of the stories loosing respect for rituals, traditions and ceremonies. These"Renaissance" writers invent and reconstruct some viable traditions of the South as the traditions differ in other parts of the United States. Cleanth Brooks summarizes certain characteristics of southern tradition, as presented in poems, essays and novels of "The Southern Renaissance" period: "a feeling for concrete and the specific, an awareness of conflict, a sense of community and of religious wholeness, a belief in human imperfection, and a genuine and never wavering disbelief in perfection ever developing as a result of human effort and planing; a deep-seated sense of the tragic, and a conviction that nature is mysterious and contingent. Any attempts to harness nature and make it a servant of man will always be doomed to failure."

• William Faulkner
  
  
• Zora Neale Hurston
  
  
• Alice Walker
  
  
• Works Cited