The Last of the Whitfields

by Elise Sanguinetti

An expansion of her short story “To You, Frere ‘Twig,'” Sanguinetti’s first novel focuses on the titular Whitfield family, from fictional Ashton, Georgia, a common setting for her works. It is a comedy on growing up and on making sense of the changing modern South and how it is perceived by people outside the region, including a newspaper reporter from New York.

Genres: Southern, Fiction

279 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

Reviews

[Diann Blakely]

http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/n...

I too love Renata Adler, but when I read the above item, I posted the following:

I wish I'd known about this. I would have recommended the works of Elise Sanguinetti, now sadly almost forgotten. I don't know where or how to start praising her four novels, THE LAST OF THE WHITFIELDS, THE NEW GIRL, THE DOWAGER, and BEDFORD'S STATION; but where some people might look at the tag of "Alabama author" and think "regional writer"--no, worse, "Southern Female Writer"--their themes are timeless and their historical resonances are an integral, so to speak, part of 20th American cultural history. Someone on Amazon has compared her to Louis Auchincloss, about whom my tattooed friend Ben Downing has written so eloquently, and I should add that while WHITFIELDS was re-issued by the University of Alabama Press, Sanguinetti (look up her family, the Ayers) is about as much exclusively Alabama as Auchincloss is Wall Street...or the eponymous academy in THE RECTOR OF JUSTIN.


*

My earliest memories of the word are aural and biracial: I remember sitting under a glass-topped table in my grandmother’s kitchen in Anniston and hearing this gorgeous polyphony of women’s voices, black and white, call and response, with no real effort at answering the original speaker or the songs on the radio that often played.

Race has proved a natural constant throughout my work, and the vague, inchoate, and disturbing feelings on the subject were first reflected to me in two Alabamians’ novels: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and Elise Sanguinetti’s first book, THE LAST OF THE WHITFIELDS. The latter was the more powerful influence, perhaps because of its humor, yet I find myself returning to Sanguinetti’s more somber, subsequent three books: http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/....

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

great southern story

[Anne Jennings · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminds me of my youth. It is hilarious but also an accurate portrayal of life in the mid-20th century South.