The Soul of the South, by Paul Theroux

The South is easy to find but hard to sort out, and it is full of paradoxes. Once, I was talking Southern fiction with William Styron and he said, “I come from the High South”—he was from Virginia, and he was mildly boasting. Like many writers who had left the South to find a life in the North, he often talked fondly about the region that had formed him.