George Singleton: The People’s Satirist

Around the time I became aware that adult conversations could turn salacious, I remember my relatives complaining about a person who gave my grandfather pornography. They claimed he was a madman and a degenerate. It wasn’t until much later that I figured out they were talking about George Singleton. 

This happened in 1993, and I was 10. Singleton had published a short story in Playboy, and, proud to be in such a high-profile magazine, he shared the accomplishment with my grandfather, who was something of a father figure to him. My religious family didn’t understand the gesture, took offense, and afterwards spoke of Singleton as “that perverted writer.” 

Singleton has always been the subject of gossip in my family. He grew up next door to my mother in a small South Carolina town that, until the Reagan era, was dominated by the textile industry. Singleton is the opposite of my family in many ways: he drinks a lot, curses like a sailor, reads Marx, and hates both Republicans and organized religion. I’ve always looked up to Singleton, who refers to himself as my “kind-of uncle.” I feel akin to him as another strange bird never quite comfortable in the rural South. 

For the past three decades, Singleton has converted his own feelings of alienation into first-rate fiction, chronicling the decline of cotton culture and cultivating some of the region’s most astute and scathing satire. 

While Singleton might not be a household name, especially outside of the South, he has published 12 books and numerous stories in publications like Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and Oxford American. The recipient of prominent awards including a Pushcart Prize, the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he was also the James C. Cobb Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Wofford College from 2013-2020. 

His latest book, You Want More: Selected Stories of George Singleton, is a compilation of 30 of his best stories, spanning eight collections and more than 20 years. With its compelling menagerie of Southern oddballs and outcasts, You Want More demonstrates that he's one of the nation's best short story writers, and without a doubt he's one of the most hilarious. 

Beyond the humor, there is depth and beauty and tragedy. His stories portray the South as it was and is, celebrating when appropriate, while also critiquing its racism, religiosity, and narrow-minded conservatism. Singleton’s fiction is a call to arms, a black sheep’s instruction manual about how to agitate and ultimately how to make the region better. 

Singleton is fond of that old chestnut from Flannery O’Connor about how if you survive childhood, you’ll possess more stories than you could write in a lifetime. The dedication of You Want More reads, “In memory of my father, George (1925-1983), and mother, Bev (1928-2015) — plus their odd assortment of friends, merchant seaman to lawyers — who raised me with outlandish, questionable stories.” 

Born in Anaheim, California, in 1958, everyone called him Little George because his father, a merchant marine, was George. In 1963, during a terrible storm, his father fell 45 feet into the empty hold of a ship and broke 57 bones, including both hips and his back. Little George had just turned 5, and his father was 38. After the accident, his father became a morphine addict and later struggled with alcohol. “He’d drink a whole quart of vodka in one gulp just to ease the pain.” 

After telling this to me recently on Zoom, Singleton sprang from his seat. “Hold on. Let’s have a show and tell.” When he sat back down in front of his computer, he was cradling a thick 8-inch metal rod with a ball attached to one end. “Here’s one of his hips.” He flashed a smile, and I laughed but the sight made me queasy. “It’s not like I pulled it out of his corpse, Zack.” 

He explained that as new advancements in hip replacement came on the market, his father would upgrade. The doctor got a kick out of giving his father’s old hips to Little George. To this day, he keeps them arranged on the edge of his desk. “They make great paperweights,” he declared. Singleton then pointed to an urn perched on the top of a bookshelf behind him and said, “There’s mom.” 

After his father’s accident, the family left California and moved to Greenwood, South Carolina, because Singleton’s grandfather had offered his father a job there at his textile supply company. 

As they crossed the country, they stopped to visit his father’s mother, Nelta, who had divorced her husband in 1941. Nelta played honky-tonk piano in a burlesque joint in Dallas. The venue was owned by Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald who (may have) killed John F. Kennedy. 

This was the only time Little George ever met her. She wore a dead fox around her neck and gifted him a chocolate Easter bunny, despite the fact that it was August. When he unwrapped it, the bunny was white and chalky, and its head had been gnawed off.

Once settled in South Carolina, the family attended the local Baptist church. In 1965, a member of the congregation made an overtly racist comment, which was met with general approval in the church. Outraged, his father stormed out, Little George in tow, wearing a seersucker suit. They never returned. 

When he was a kid, the Ku Klux Klan often staged parades through the streets of his neighborhood. The Klan, dressed in full regalia and driving boat-sized convertibles, would drive slowly through the streets, flags aflutter. Little George would hide in the bushes and lie in wait. He’d then pelt the cars with rocks and run like hell. 

Singleton’s father believed it necessary for his son to meet people from all walks of life. When Singleton was 8, his father bought him a pet rabbit from a man who was missing his right arm. Singleton wanted a dog, not a rabbit. 

After they sealed the deal, Little George went to shake the man’s hand: he stuck out his right and shook the man’s left. It was an awkward gesture, and the man seemed embarrassed. On the way back to the car, his father wacked him across the ass with his cane. “You got to pay attention, boy,” he said. To accommodate the man’s missing right arm, Little George should have offered his left. 

His father, who was himself severely disabled, was trying to teach his son about empathy. This lesson extended to all — people of different bodies, races, genders, and classes. 

His father held deep convictions about the political potential of the proletariat. Although he had only a 10th grade education, he enthusiastically recommended that Little George read Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto and Émile Durkheim’s Socialism. “He was a union guy. ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ was in his blood.” In Greenwood, a textile town full of anti-union workers and bosses, his father’s revolutionary spirit was met with skepticism and even scorn. 

Singleton inherited his father’s thirst for knowledge and eventually studied philosophy at Furman University. However, as an undergraduate, it was writing fiction, not philosophy, that captivated him. He discovered John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon. “At the age of 21, I thought, man, I can do this. And I proved that I could, but it took about 22 more years.”

Singleton scoffs at those Southern writers who claim to have read the complete works of William Faulkner before puberty. His chief literary guide was Henry Gibson from the 1960s sketch comedy show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” After one of his father’s hip replacements, a 13-year-old Singleton penned a comedic poem, inspired by “Laugh-In,” and recited it for him in the hospital. Because his father laughed, he was hooked.  

In Greenwood, South Carolina, nothing was funny. But misery it had in spades. So when Singleton heard Irish writer Samuel Beckett’s dictum that nothing is funnier than human misery, he knew that he had a rich vein to mine. 

In the early days of his literary preoccupation, Singleton wrote three novels set outside of his hometown: one in France where he had spent a mere 10 weeks, one in Washington, D.C., where he had lived for eight months, and one in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had never set foot. 

Over the years, agents and editors have incessantly implored Singleton to write novels and not short stories. Singleton once got so exasperated with the publishing industry’s obsession with novels that he wrote a novel called Novel: A Novel featuring a protagonist named Novel. 

It was reading O’Connor that changed his mind about focusing on his hometown, and that formed his belief in the power of the short story.

That Singleton utilizes his own memories in his fiction should not lead one to believe that his work is sentimental or nostalgic. He is impatient with what he calls the “grandma on the front porch in a rocking chair with some snuff” school of Southern literature. 

Singleton makes no bones about his feelings toward certain people in the South, and this offends some readers. “I can talk shit about the South, because I’m from here. People tell me sometimes that I’m mean about South Carolina, but what I’m saying is true.” 

Most of the protagonists in You Want More are disillusioned, if not disgusted with their small towns. They bridle against conservatism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity; and many want to “hit the road for bigger and better places, a more worldly life.” 

Singleton isn’t attempting to speak for or about entire regions. His work is unique to his own experience and the various foibles he has witnessed. He writes candidly and critically, with neither a demeaning spirit, nor the romance and reverence common to some contemporary Southern and Appalachian authors. 

Many literary critics and dust jacket blurbers focus on Singleton’s signature sardonic humor. This is fitting, as he ranks among the South’s all-time funniest writers. Stories in You Want More feature, for example, a traveling vet who inexplicably shows up to euthanize a man’s dog dressed in Renaissance garb, a college professor who scams his university by teaching a course on the novels of Raymond Carver (Carver famously only wrote short stories), a second-grade teacher who accidentally sings “The Name Game” in a class full of Chucks, a man whose life is ruined after he appears in a head lice PSA, and on and on.

But to emphasize the wild hilarity runs the risk of missing Singleton’s sharp-eyed cultural commentary. He is a harsh, but necessary and incisive, critic of the South. 

Unlike other so-called Grit Lit or Rough South writers, such as Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, and Harry Crews, Singleton’s protagonists exist outside of mainstream Southern cultures. They tend to be white and rural, but also liberal and progressive in communities that are markedly conservative and religious. Singleton’s greatest contribution to Southern letters may be the creation of characters who exist in this liminal space. They are simultaneously insiders and outsiders, and as such they diagnose cultural pathologies from within. 

Singleton’s protagonists are often bitter from childhoods in which narrow-minded people nearly succeeded in making them narrow-minded. But rarely do they get mired in this bitterness. Instead, they seek out better, more fulfilling, more equitable existences. At times, this occurs in the small towns of his native upstate South Carolina; other times, his characters find happiness elsewhere.

Like them, Singleton knows when to cheer and when to balk, when to stay and when to go.

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