Hohenwald, Tenn., is a typical New South small town. One-story factories fashioned out of unpainted cinder blocks sit on its outskirts; a thin service economy of gas stations, fast food joints and moribund mom-and-pop stores populates the town center. Those who leave in search of higher wages or education rarely come back, and those who stay hover between struggling to keep their families afloat and wasting away at a local tavern, haunted by a sense of being left behind by the rest of the country.

It is a town—and a feeling—that William Gay knows well. The author of two novels and a newly released book of short stories, Gay was born in Hohenwald and today lives just four miles from where he grew up. He has watched the town change, watched the economically depressed but culturally distinct agrarian society he knew as a child turn into the more assimilated, bland sprawl it is today. “Inevitably, the South is going to change,” he said during a recent interview in the den of his single-wide trailer, just outside of town. “It’s moving toward a sort of sameness.”

Though he would likely never claim the title as his own, Gay has become, in just a few short years, the bard of rural Tennessee, preserving in his stories the people and places of his childhood that are now fast disappearing. Rural Middle Tennessee, either real or fictionalized, dominates Gay’s writing, the way the Delta region dominates Faulkner or tidewater Virginia dominates the work of William Styron. Gay’s novels—The Long Home and Provinces of Night—and all the stories in the collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down are set in and around Ackerman’s Field, a fictionalized Hohenwald, sometimes in the present, sometimes in the 1940s and 1950s.

“It seems like the South was changing and I wasn’t always pleased with what it was changing into so much,” he says. “I wanted to write about the South at the point where it started to be assimilated into the larger culture, but before that completely happened. I sort of think that’s happened now. The South had so many little idiosyncrasies and eccentricities that were different from anywhere else, and I hate to see all that difference disappear.”

Since the release of The Long Home in 1999, Gay has been building a strong base of fans throughout the South, people both urban and rural, bookworms and merely occasional readers. His writing is consistently praised as unique and evocative, but readers are just as likely attracted to the man himself: Fifty-nine years old and content to live in rural seclusion, Gay stands in opposition to the young literary phenoms who win critical and popular success one year only to vanish the next, never to be heard of again. Gay, like his writing, has an eminent maturity, a sense of permanence and being that defies everything that goes into the contemporary “literary fiction” industry.

All of which has him more than a little perplexed. “I was really surprised at some of the reviews,” he says. “I thought I was working a really narrow niche. I was writing about marginal people in marginal situations, and I didn’t think there would be a great deal of interest in that kind of stuff in New York. But apparently I was doing something a little different from what I thought I was doing.”

Nevertheless, “phenomenon” is a word not wholly inapplicable to Gay’s success. After struggling to get published for more than 30 years, he managed to place a short story in the Georgia Review in 1998. Soon after, he published The Long Home through a small press called MacMurray and Beck; at the time he didn’t even have an agent. But the book’s critical acclaim helped Gay win both the James A. Michener Memorial Prize and the William Peden Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, almost overnight making him a vibrant landmark on the map of contemporary Southern fiction.

Nor is Gay’s newfound career limited to literature. He has turned a lifelong passion for music into a side project as a reviewer and critic, primarily for the Oxford American. He has written on everything from John Prine to MerleFest, an annual gathering of country and folk musicians and fans in North Carolina. “I would not dare to put out a music issue that didn’t have a William Gay piece in it,” says Marc Smirnoff, editor in chief of the Oxford American, which is publishing again after an almost year-long hiatus.

Thanks in no small part to his critical reception, Gay has also fast become a favorite of the academic world, particularly at Sewanee, where he has several times attended the Southern Writers’ Conference, and where he taught a writing seminar as a Tennessee Williams Fellow. Wyatt Prunty, a Sewanee English professor who runs the conference, says that Gay’s work impresses him both for its maturity and its unique feel for the Southern landscape. “I wouldn’t make him a subset of anybody,” Prunty says. “I would say that he’s unique, he’s an original and I think the biggest thing is that he so vividly inhabits this world of people who are just getting by, and on the other hand, he writes about them on a completely different plane.”

But while Gay has come to accept some of the trappings of literary success—the need to tour, the constant requests for interviews—he is still uncomfortable with his newfound popularity. “I meet people who say, I’ve read your book four times, five times, whatever,” he says. “I met somebody who said, 'I keep it on my nightstand; I read from it every night.’ That’s a little—that’s probably information I don’t need. That’s probably a little intimidating. Maybe I think that’s overreaction or something.”

To look at him, William Gay is not the sort of man you might expect to be churning out award-winning fiction. Slightly hunched, scruffy and wrinkled, you’d more likely take him for a backwoods sot, a man of dubious employ and morals. His long graying hair and dark, constantly squinting eyes give him an air of otherworldliness, not necessarily pleasant. He smokes heavily and drinks often, and cares little about what sort of impression this gives other people. “He doesn’t seem to give a shit about what anybody thinks about him, or he would probably be living in a house or something,” says fellow writer and close friend George Singleton.

On the other hand, Gay is just the sort of man you’d expect to find at the tail-end of a career in carpentry and miscellaneous construction, which is how he made his living until his writing took off. He was born in Hohenwald in 1943, and after graduating high school entered the Navy, serving on a destroyer in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War. By that time, he was already interested in writing and had the good fortune to end his tour stationed in New York City.

It was the mid-1960s, and the Greenwich Village arts scene was getting started, along with the antiwar movement and all else that would culminate, within a few years, in the youth revolution. Gay, a backwoods Tennessee boy, suddenly found himself in another world, and he embraced it heartily. He let his hair grow long, he participated in marches and every weekend he went to the bars and folk clubs below 14th Street. “I was obsessed with Bob Dylan, and I would go hang around those places,” he says. “I never saw Dylan up there, but I saw a lot of other good people. Anywhere you wanted to go up there, you’d hear great music. There was a feeling of, almost like kinship. I had gone to New York from the South, and I had always heard how cold New Yorkers were. And I didn’t get any of that at all.”

After spending a few years in New York, Gay moved back to Hohenwald, but left again almost immediately because he couldn’t find work—a common occurrence in the postwar rural South. “Even in the ’60s,” he says, “there was a migration from the South to the North because the money was so much better. They had unions and they had better working conditions. And at that time the South was kind of running out of things to do. If you weren’t equipped to get some kind of white collar job or something like that, it was pretty much farming or working in a sawmill or cutting logs.”

Gay ended up in Chicago, where he found a job building pinball machines for Williams Electronics. “I lived in this area where all the hillbillies migrated from the South—from Kentucky, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, everywhere—and they were all penned into this little hillbilly ghetto called Kenmore Avenue,” he says. “It was a pretty rough place. The bars were the kind of bars where you push the door open and stick your head in before you ease into the room because you don’t know what somebody’s goin’ to be throwing.”

The move to Chicago made a large enough impression on Gay that he includes a character in Provinces of Night who follows almost the exact same path. In fact, listening to him tell his biography is like getting the short version of many of his stories’ strongest plot strings. So it’s not surprising to learn that Gay’s wanderings were a conscious part of his literary development, a process begun in high school when a teacher gave him a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (an event he would later incorporate into the story of Fleming Bloodworth, the protagonist of Provinces of Night). “That sort of blew me away,” he says. “You know, for a teenager that’s powerful stuff.”

His move to New York, he says, was in part simply an extension of his literary pretensions: “That’s where everybody went. If you’re going to be in the theater, if you’re going to write, New York was the place.”

But Gay found himself unable to write up North, and in 1978 he moved back to Hohenwald for good. Over the next 20 years, through a series of jobs—sometimes piecework, sometimes full-time positions—he wrote: at night, on the weekends, sometimes staying up until 2 a.m. at his typewriter, after his wife and four children had gone to bed. And though he still wasn’t getting published, he found himself more driven to write than ever before. “I guess [my writing] only started to work when I started writing about things I knew really well. The geography I knew really well, the way of life.”

Frustration soon became the dominant theme in his life, as he sent out story after story, only to have them rejected, usually without comment. He quit more than once, resigned to life as just another would-be writer. “But then I would get another idea,” he says. “I would think, 'This is the one.’ Because I always figured, you know, that there would be one, there would be a point where something would be good enough to publish.”

It didn’t help, of course, that the 1980s were not a good time to be a Southern writer. Outside of Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy and a handful of others, the scene was barren, and the dominance of such witty, urbane writers as Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis ensured that readers stayed far away from anyone with even the hint of a twang.

Slowly, though, things began to change. McCarthy won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses—an unabashed cowboy Western—in 1992, and in 1997 Charles Frazier won the same award for Cold Mountain, a tale of the post-Civil War Carolinas. The success of the latter, Gay believes, in turn made it possible for writers like himself to get published. “Cold Mountain was such a huge book, and Charles Frazier wrote in a style a little bit like McCarthy—a little bit Gothic. I think the success of that book made editors think, 'Well, maybe your book, with the Southern stuff coming out a little bit closer, maybe if it worked to their advantage, it will work for us.’ ”

In 1998, Gay received a call from an editor at The Georgia Review, a literary quarterly, who said they liked a short story he had sent over a year before, entitled “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down.” He soon published another story in The Missouri Review, and through a contact there sold The Long Home to MacMurray and Beck. Within a year, he had an agent, a seminar at Sewanee and a legion of fans.

“I have a sense of irony about some of this stuff,” he says. “I’m as old as I am, and I’ve been trying to do it for so long, I think that sometimes they just don’t want to take a chance. It’s a matter of hitting the right editor, and I hit a bunch of the wrong ones early on. The stuff that I’ve sold was essentially the same type of stuff that I’d been trying to sell.... Once one person takes a chance, it seems like it gives you the legitimacy.”

While Gay professes to take only a mild interest in his own success, his admirers see in him much more than just another hot-item writer. Though his work is distinctly Southern in voice, style and narrative, its themes—of rootlessness in the face of change, of just scraping by—ring true far beyond the South, especially in a time when people around the country are struggling economically, all the while watching the last vestiges of traditional America disappear. “One can get away with saying William is a Southern writer, but only if you’ve read him very superficially,” says Smirnoff of the Oxford American, one of the first magazines to publish Gay’s fiction.

More than social commentary, though, fellow writers and academics say Gay’s work, like that of Faulkner, has a relevance outside of the South because of his ability to capture the relationship between people and their natural surroundings. “It’s absolutely Southern in region,” says author Barry Hannah. “But William would be important in I think any region, in the way he renders land, and renders people and nature and the sky.”

Sewanee professor Prunty praises Gay’s ability to move in and out of his settings with ease, a capacity that keeps the story on pace but also highlights its deeper significance. “It reminds me of a combination of the sort of tough realism that you associate with McCarthy, who obviously had an influence on him, and a touch of Flannery O’Connor,” he says. “Just real good writing. He goes back and forth from this anatomically precise, succinct descriptive writing that comes in very well-thought-out sequences to this almost baroque descriptive movement.”

This sense of movement between hard-bitten realism and poetic description is a hallmark of Gay’s style; in The Long Home, for example, he writes: “For Brother Hovington lay in agony, in an alteration of time juryrigged so by pain that its passage seemed scarcely discernible. In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accretions of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, shunted aside by time’s next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman’s mutterings from a snare in the web of the world.”

It’s a moving passage, if only for the flow of the words, but it also reminds the reader that the events of the narrative are not simply a story, but intimately connected moments in the “web of the world.” As Prunty says, “That is an interesting aesthetic experience, because you’re both in their world, absolutely in it, when you’re reading, and yet you’re always, at the same time, somehow above it.”

Gay’s style has been equally praised by his fellow writers, many of whom take a similar approach to the fast-changing South. Hannah, the author of such classic works of Southern literature as Airships and Geronimo Rex, says, “It’s like returning to handwork in fiction—the words are so precise and the rhetoric convincing.”

As Gay has grown as a writer, he—along with George Singleton, Tom Franklin and a handful of other authors—has also been gathering steam behind a new paradigm in Southern literature, one that looks beyond such stalwart themes as the legacy of the Civil War and instead tackles the complex relationship between the South and the rest of the United States over the last 50 years. “The South is changing about as dynamically and as rapidly, and with as much dynamic force, as any part of the country,” Prunty says. “What we mean by the South is something, at least on a sociopolitical and economic basis, very different.”

As a result, he explains, writers like Gay are having to shape a new conception of the South, and of Southern literature, in the face of a wide variety of assimilating forces. Gay’s writing may be largely set in the past, Prunty says, but the underlying themes—of alienation in face of change, of rootlessness—are still extremely relevant. “The people are noticeably poorer on average, it seems, than you would expect them to be today; they’re not working in factories. A lot of the area where he lives has light industry now. Nevertheless, I think of him as more contemporary than his settings.”

But while Gay may be leading the way in creating a new generation of Southern literature, some commentators think he still has a ways to go before he can establish himself as an important writer. While many people praise him for his command of style, it’s difficult to have a conversation about him without Faulkner’s or McCarthy’s name popping up. George Singleton calls him “a first cousin of Faulkner and McCarthy,” and even Gay’s agent, Amy Williams, says, “I like to call him training-bra Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy-lite.” Jay Watson, a professor of Southern literature at the University of Mississippi, goes so far as to say, “At present I find him too derivative [of McCarthy] to be a 'significant’ figure on the Southern literary scene.”

Nevertheless, it’s a comparison that Gay invites, McCarthy being one of his favorite writers. The title of Provinces of Night is taken from McCarthy’s Child of God, and the plot of The Long Home contains a number of narrative parallels to McCarthy’s own first novel, The Orchard Keeper. At the same time, many observers note Gay’s growing independence from his literary mentors, with each book moving a little further from the apprentice shadows of McCarthy, Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.

Ultimately, though, Gay seems completely unconcerned with the way the world—academic or otherwise—receives him. He says he quit a recent book tour halfway through because he was getting tired of living out of hotels, and he has little patience for Hohenwald locals who hold him aloft as a local celebrity. He’s even stopped patronizing town bars so as to avoid dealing with autograph hounds.

“When my first book came out,” he says, “I tried to compartmentalize everything; I tried to keep that life separate from this life. I wouldn’t do anything with the local paper, I wouldn’t do interviews. I said, 'I live here, and I want my life to go like it’s been going.’ But then I did a thing for The Tennessean, and they picked it up and ran it in the local paper, and that’s when it got uncomfortable going around town. I think people want to look through the books and find out if they’re real people, who’s who. One guy came out one time and he said he knew everybody in The Long Home except one person. He couldn’t figure out who that was and he wanted me to tell him.”

For now, Gay is at work on a new novel, and says he has several short stories in the hopper—along with yet another novel, about highwaymen along the Natchez Trace during the early 19th century, that he has mostly completed but put off for the time being. “It’s about these bandits who hung out on the Trace and preyed on people who were coming back overland, to Kentucky or Nashville or somewhere,” he says. “But it was a little bit different from the other two books, and I thought maybe I should wait and do it later. Because it’s got a lot of sentimental stuff in it.”

Gay says he has talked with his two sons, who live with him, about using some of his newfound wealth to build a house. (His two daughters are married and live nearby.) But other than a new television and several stacks of DVDs, it’s hard to find evidence of a material change in Gay’s life. In the same way that his writing preserves the now vanishing rural South, Gay’s outlook on his life seems more about maintaining the way things used to be—before the literary awards, the teaching seminars, the book tours.

“I don’t take it terribly seriously,” he says of his success. “I mean it’s nice and it’s what I wanted to do. I want it to be published. But I’m old enough to have seen different things come and go. Something comes into style, goes out of style. I’m kind of a fatalist, I think. If it goes this way, OK. If it goes that way, OK.”