GSBC - By the #'s

The Great Southern Book Club

By the Numbers

Men outnumber women 59/41, and the gap hasn't closed much with time — women's share of titles was 40% before 1990 and 42% after.

Counted by book, not unique author. Faulkner alone accounts for 17 of the 118 “Men” slots—nearly 1 in 7—so repeat authors have a meaningful effect on the overall split.

White authors dominate 76/24, but this is where real change shows up — non-white representation more than doubled, from 15% of pre-1990 titles to 36% since. The list is diversifying by race far faster than by gender.

Three eras dominate — the 2010s, the 1950s (Faulkner/O'Connor/Welty), and the 2000s — with almost nothing before 1920. The "canon" isn't static; it keeps refreshing itself roughly every generation rather than freezing in the past.

The Most Prolific

William Faulkner

14 books. Takes #6, #9, and #13 — three titles in the top 15 — and spans 1929's The Sound and the Fury to 1962's The Reivers.

Flannery O'Connor

5 books. Anchored by The Complete Stories at #36, with Wise Blood (#66), A Good Man Is Hard to Find (#90), The Violent Bear It Away (#99), and Everything That Rises Must Converge (#101).

Walker Percy

4 books. The Moviegoer opens strong at #4, followed by The Second Coming (#55), The Last Gentleman (#102), and Love in the Ruins (#104).

Eudora Welty

4 books. The steadiest spread of the group, with four books at #27 (The Optimist's Daughter), #68, #103, and #145.

Most Forgotten

Up-and-coming

Lois Lenski

Strawberry Girl (#180, 1945). A Newbery Medal-winning Florida cracker classic depicting citrus farming and rural hardship in the Ridge country, now largely forgotten outside regional circles.

Julia Peterkin

Scarlet Sister Mary (#40, 1928). The first Southern woman to win the Pulitzer Prize — a massive literary milestone at the time — yet virtually unread and untaught today, complicated by its white author's depiction of Gullah life.

James Gould Cozzens

Guard of Honor (#63, 1948). Won the Pulitzer Prize and was once ranked as a giant of American fiction. He’s become the textbook case of a reputation collapse—the backlash surrounding By Love Possessed and the 1957 Time cover story helped erase him from the literary conversation.

Addie E. Citchens

Dominion (#119, 2025). Set in a fictional Mississippi town, it follows a preacher's outwardly respectable family as the rot underneath comes out — a sharp, unsparing debut, and the newest book on the whole list.

Jonathan Escoffery

If I Survive You (#84, 2022). Linked stories following a Jamaican-Miami family whose house is literally sinking into its foundation — the narrator gets read as a different race depending on which country he's standing in, and the prose shifts fluently between English and patois to match.

Robert Jones Jr.

The Prophets (#113, 2021). Two enslaved men fall in love on a Mississippi plantation, and their bond threatens the owner's breeding operation — a debut that argues Black queerness isn't a modern addition to history but something that was always there.

"Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'" ― Mark Twain

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