The Hard Blue Sky (1958) by Shirley Grau

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Hard Blue Sky (1958)

by Shirley Grau

Isle Aux Chiens, Louisiana

Louisiana: 11/28

  I think the highest compliment I can pay a book on this particular list is when I look up the location on the map of the project and then open the corresponding Google Maps location- that shows that I am interested.  That's what I did while reading The Hard Blue Sky, an early novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Grau.  I think looking at an Ngram for William Faulkner is a good proxy for interest in southern literature- Faulkner himself was the subject of a revival that saw him peak in interest in 1960 and plummet after 1990.  Grau- a New Yorker short story writer who won the Pulitzer in 1965- seems like a beneficiary of that interest.  I surmise that the drop off in William Faulkner interest in the 90's relates to what I imagine to be a wholesale replacement of Faulkner in American Literature survey courses with writer like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.  If you draw another Ngram with Faulkner and Toni Morrison you see the lines cross in 1994, the year after Morrison won the Nobel.  Faulkner, who won the Nobel in 1949, required further help from American critics specifically Under the Volcano author Malcolm Lowry, who is frequently credited with helping Faulkner get the Nobel in '49, and made further efforts to ensure his books didn't fall out of print before that. 

 I mention that because I would say Grau is largely forgotten- her Pulitzer winner has over 6000 reviews on Amazon, which indicates some continuing interest, but her other books top out at 100 reviews, with some in double digits.  She got a New York Times feature obituary when she died in 2020 but he last NYT mention was in 2003.   The Hard Blue Sky is a good example of the promise of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project: Rediscovering a once prominent author who I would otherwise never encounter. 

  It's also hard not to wonder if this physical landscape might itself be on the way out as a result of climate change and rising sea levels- this is a place where houses have been built on stilts for decades and maybe for centuries.  Besides the locale, the book itself, centered on the life of a young woman coming-of-age after the untimely death of her mother, rarely rises beyond the tropes of the coming of age novel circa the late 1950's.   The lessons learned by Grau's protagonist are far more genteel than the lessons learned by her African American counterparts in this part of the country:  No one gets rapes.  No one is murdered by law enforcement for no reason.  No one has their house burned to the ground by marauding members of the Klu Klux Klan.