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THE TIN ROOF AND OTHER STORIES OF THE NEW SOUTH. (ORIGINAL WRITING)
Abstract
This collection of fourteen stories and an afterword is arranged in order from the youngest main character to the oldest. All but two of the stories are set in various rural and urban areas of West Tennessee; one of the other two is set in Nashville and the other involves a Memphian "exiled" in Minneapolis. The stories were written in a variety of styles from realism ("The Rooming House"), to fantasy ("Monument"). The former is told by a young boy growing up Catholic during the time of the Kennedy election. He lives in the rooming house of his great-aunts because religious fervor had built against the family in a smaller, fundamentalist town, and there meets a roomer who wants to bring the boy out of his shell by showing him the honky-tonks. The latter describes an old man and his wife who live in an isolated county toward which every bear in the world is migrating. Between these extremes of style are stories of a tough boy in a textile-mill company town, a pool hall half-wit, a young girl on a farm and a neighbor who stalks her with a rifle, men who drag a river chute for bodies, a couple contending with a leaky roof that is driving the wife insane, a bank robber out to commit suicide in a spectacular way, a family waiting for the birth of their incestuous baby, and a man who since he found three dead bodies in one month had been known as bad luck. The afterword then describes a writer sitting back in his chair, trying to trace the sources that made up the stories he'd written. He thinks through a vast list from large subjects such as climate, upbringing and literature to smaller subjects such as the noise from the refrigerator by where he wrote. He fails to narrow the choice, but in the process he discovers the bottomless variety of memory, which is the source of his stories.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
FLYNN, JOHN DAVID, "THE TIN ROOF AND OTHER STORIES OF THE NEW SOUTH. (ORIGINAL WRITING)" (1984). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8423783.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8423783