William Faulkner on The South

"Because it is himself that the Southerner is writing about, not about his environment: who has, figuratively speaking, taken the artist in him in one hand and his milieu in the other and thrust the one into the other like a clawing and spitting cat into a croker sack. And he writes. We have never got and probably will never get, anywhere with music or the plastic forms. We need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage. We seem to try in the simple furious breathing (or writing) span of the individual to draw a savage indictment of the contemporary scene or to escape from it into a makebelieve region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds which perhaps never existed anywhere. Both of the courses are rooted in sentiment; perhaps the ones who write savagely and bitterly of the incest in clayfloored cabins are the most sentimental. Anyway, each course is a matter of violent partisanship, in which the writer unconsciously writes into every line and phrase his violent despairs and rages and frustrations or his violent prophesies of still more violent hopes." 

[introdução inédita - publicada postumamente - a The Sound and the Fury (1929)

“In the nineteenth century,” John Sartoris had said, ‘‘worrying over genealogy anywhere is poppycock. But particularly so in America, where only what a man takes and keeps has any significance, and where all of us have a common ancestry and the only house from which we can claim descent with any assurance, is the Old Bailey. Yet the man who professes to care nothing about his forbears is only a little less vain than he who bases all his actions on blood precedent. And a Sartoris is entitled to a little vanity and poppycock, if he wants it.”
Faulkner, Flags in the Dust (published posthumously, 1973; its abridged and edited version, Sartoris, was published in 1929)

"He [John Sartoris] is thinking of this whole country which he is trying to raise by its bootstraps, so that all the people in it, not just his kind nor his old regiment, but all the people, black and white, the women and children back in the hills who don't even own shoes-Don't you see?"
"But how can they get any good from what he wants to do for them if they are-after he has------"
"Killed some of them? I suppose you include those two carpet baggers he had to kill to hold that first election, don't you?"
"They were men. Human beings."
"They were Northerners, foreigners who had no business here. They were pirates." (William Faulkner, The Unvanquished, 1938)

For more on the South (whose mythic separateness from the North dates further back than the American Civil War) you might want to read this literary justification by one of the authors in our syllabus, Flannery O'Connor.