April 6, 2010

The board of the Southern Literary Trail officially passed and adopted its by-laws. The trail is the only tri-state literary trail in the United States, with Georgia and Mississippi joining Alabama as partner states. The trail’s principal theme is the influence of “place” on Southern writers’ work. Each city or town on the trail must be home to a place that influenced a writer of a well-known work of fiction. Alabama’s original trail towns and places included the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald House Museum in Montgomery; the Old Monroe County Courthouse of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird;” and the surviving commercial buildings of Lillian Hellman’s family in Demopolis that inspired the settings and plot twists of her plays “The Little Foxes“ and “Another Part of the Forest.”

Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.

The Southern Literary Trail celebrates literary figures from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia by focusing on the places that inspired their work. A series of events at involved cities, known as Trailfest, includes theatrical productions of writers’ works, literary tours, and academic conferences. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of the Southern Literary Trail, logo designed by Kirk Brooker)

For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.