[MUSIC] Southern novelists are among the greatest novelists in history. William Faulkner, Richard Wright, the list goes on. And when we look at the novel, we see a long view, a, voice that tells the story of the South. And it is often a story as in the case of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines. Or Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner, that spans a century from Civil War to Civil Rights. And when we look at the novel, we see within it the episodes of life, of generations. And the stories of the South that linger in the ear of a community and are translated and transferred by the novelist onto the pages of fiction. Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," is a classic portrait of southern politics and the legacy of Huey Long in Louisiana. Mr. Warren grew up in the shadow of the Civil War. Hearing the stories of his grandfather when he as a child visited him. And those stories and many others live on through novelists like Robert Penn Warren, Faulkner, Eudora Welter, and Richard Wright. And Alex Haley talks about the power of the South as a place of hands, touch, of deep feeling. And that is the spirit that southern novelists capture in such powerful ways. >> I'm influenced in whatever I say by the fact that I innately love the South. I really truly think it's the best place in this country to live. I like the people. People are kinder. More and we're certainly better raised than most of the people I've met from other parts of the country. We are, the things we like we really go after and its not generally mechanized to industrialize technological things. Not so much as who is showing a picture that's more, and, and, and I'm particularly moved by hands. People's hands doing things. Or if you look at the hands of old ladies they'll tell you more about that lady's life than a little bit. It's said that women's hands in particular show their. Age and their, what their life has been like more than anything else about them. And, I just feel the South is a, is a place of hands. It's a place of touch, of caress, of, of less of slapping and knocking people down this softer sweeter culture on the whole.