Missouri is a partially Southern state

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Missouri is already part of the Rivalry Faction (LSU, A&M, Arkansas, Missouri). After burning Lawrence for a tuneup we're swinging back east.

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I think it's hard to deny that Southern culture overlaps into southern Missouri in a wide variety of ways

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Anyone that has spent more than 15 minutes in Branson knows this to be true. It is basically Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg West.

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Holy shite did I get in your head

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I haven't even seen whatever post you're referring to. This was more in response to the repeated theme of "yankee" going on around here

We are the meth kingpins. That must account for something.

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I haven't even seen whatever post you're referring to. This was more in response to the repeated theme of "yankee" going on around here

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Because it's a way to rag on us? You could have 100 percent evidence and we'd still be called yankee's.

Noone believes everyone in A&M actually has the ghey either. Yet that's their claim to fame.

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Has anybody that has tried to flame us for this actually watched The Outlaw Josey Wales?

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No, nor have they probably visited Missouri at all. Most people flaming Missouri as "yankees" have undoubtedly not been here.

The original post's thesis is fair enough. I just got through explaining that Mizzou is a Midwestern state with definite Southern influence in certain parts (before I saw this). I think the OP is fair enough in his description here. Tho' I would advise the OP that every non-Southeastern/those who don't originate in the traditional South (VA, NC, TN, AL, GA, Miss, FL, SC, LA*) are subject to question. Even other traditional members of the Upper South like KY come down to where in KY one is from. The same for MD and by-God-West Virginia!

*Louisiana though southern has always been in a league all it's own.

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If that means we southerners can lay claim to Sam Clemens as one of our own, then I'm inclined agree with you.

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We could already do that given his connections to Tennessee as well as the fact he was likely conceived here.

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From the standpoint of literary criticism, I struggle with Clemens' proper classification. He at one point enlisted in the Confederate Army, yet on several occasions refused to self-identify as a southerner. Perhaps he, like Styron nearly a century later, refused to do so because he felt his art debased by being constrained into a "southern" school. Unlike most southern writers of the period (save, perhaps, George Cable) he actually produced something greater than the superficial re-hashing of truisms that characterized the section's literature until the mid-1920's with Faulkner, Wolfe, et al. & the Southern "renascence."

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Well, Clemens/Twain went through a big revolution and actually thought about how white southerners treated black southerners and decided it was wrong. People of color are every bit the southerner white folks are and Clemens saw this and the wealthy white hypocrisy with regards to claiming to be moral while acting very immoral early on. He doesn't praise a high and mighty moral South that never existed but instead criticized the hypocrisy as well as the North in a manner that only a Southerner could effectively do (he knew each region's warts but he also knew that as a collective people we had high ambitions).

I think his life and works have to be read that way. Though you mention Faulkner's truisms he too did the same thing but in a different way in 'Absalom! Absalom!' when the character of Quentin was asked why he hated the South by a Northern roommate who had wanted to Quentin to tell him about the South over the course of the novel. Quentin's reply captures the love-hate relationship many Southerners have with regards to the South. (At least that's my reading of him).

We love our region and are quick to defend it against what we see as hypocritical attacks by outsiders who think they're better but we also see the wrongs. In some ways, the thinking Southerner of all colors is far more aware of our region's faults than those from elsewhere, imo.

I think Styron carried on that tradition as did Harper Lee and so many other southern writers e.g. O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote Tennessee Williams, and even the earlier works of Cormac Mccarthy although they all did so in different ways and tackled very different aspects of our society.

Clemens didn't want to be a part of the 'southern' school back then because it was a literary ghetto where he'd rot away and the finger he pointed at society would never be heard, and make no mistake, while he wrote about the South he was simultaneously pointing the finger at others. For Clemens, to be ghettoized to the southern school meant you were now writing mainly for southerners and stuck in a place place where black and white southerners were supposed to tell outsiders what they wanted to hear.

A lot of writers from the Harlem Renaissance, many of whom were also Southern, didn't want to be lumped in as a black writers because that meant they were effectively silenced when it came to mainstream readers.

And btw, JB14 thanks for an excellent convo starter.

South Missouri is a bit like Arkansas. I lived in St Louis for 4 yrs and there is nothing southern about it or Columbia.