Look homeward, Mrs. Umstead

Overall, I feel about Southern Lit much as Kathleen does, and that comes as someone whose education was 100 percent Southern. I'm getting ready to reread the short stories of Flannery O'Connor, and I would add Carson McCullers to the "like" list too.
And I share the abiding dislike for Faulkner, which began about the same time as my affinity for Thomas Wolfe: my senior year of high school in Apex, North Carolina. This came during AP English, on a trip to the Apex Public Library. AP English was the first class I ever loved; I remember all the papers I wrote for it. It was run as a college course, and high school had begun to bore me, so this English class probably set my destiny. My teacher, Mrs. Umstead, a large woman with a hearty laugh and mischievous eyes, had a wicked and politically incorrect sense of humor she loved to share. (When she would misspeak or drop something, she would slap her chest with the side of her hand and say, "My name is Ricardo and I am a retardo." I guess it's probably good she wasn't here in Colorado; she surely would have been tossed out on her keester.)
My main term paper was on Virginia Woolf's The Waves, which I loved precisely for its inscrutability. I felt very mature that I "got" it. Also wrote one on a contemporary Southern novel (I selected Jill McCorkle's July 7, because it was already on the family bookshelf and it had a biker on the cover, and it turned out to be a lot of fun), then a "classic" Southern novel, then one on any subject we selected (I compared the Tao Teh Ching with some New Agey, '60s spiritual book, the name of which eludes me).

Back to Wolfe. We had a list of Southern novels from which we could select, and As I Lay Dying and Look Homeward, Angel were both on the list. My best friend, Nicole, and I stood in the library along with many of our classmates, and she had the Faulkner book. "Not sure if I want to read this," she said. "But most of the other stuff's getting picked over."
It was true. The classic Southern lit section of the Apex library was looking sparse. Nobody wanted to read the Wolfe book because it was so large. The Faulkner was slightly smaller, but I looked over her shoulder, read two paragraphs, said "Frell that stuff" (in so many words) and picked up the Wolfe book. She took the Faulkner book. She went to accounting school, and I'm sure that As I Lay Dying had something to do with it.
LHA was terribly pompous, of course. But I was much more pompous then, in the way that only high-school seniors can be. That I could read such a long, pompous book and get enough out of it to write an A+ term paper made me Smart, and I was very proud of myself. I haven't read it since, and I'm sure I would have a much different opinion about it. Kathleen knows how I feel about pomposity.