SOURCE: An interview with Madison Smartt Bell, in Southern Review, Vol. 30, No. 1, January, 1994, pp. 1-12.

In the following interview, which originally took place in August, 1992, Weaks questioned Bell about the southernness of his fiction, the influence of the Fugitives/Agrarians on his work, and the future of southern literature.

[Mary Louise Weaks:] You've told me several times that you consider yourself a southern writer, yet so many places and people that you create are alien to southerners.

[Madison Smartt Bell:] Well, maybe not so much as you think. I didn't write in southern settings for a long time because I've read so much work by southerners that did use southern settings. There were two generations of writers before me who were very good, that I greatly admired. So I felt released when I discovered urban life, which I didn't know anything about as a literary subject. Not that...