At least in part I'm sure. Most such animosities, however, are over determined sorts of attitudes. Multiple things can augment and foster that kind of ill will. I imagine there some anti-woman writer prejudice in there as well. Plus, everyone's at least a little envious and resentful in private when literary lightning strikes thee and not me.
How Capote figures in the mix I haven't a clue.
I wonder though, concerning regional bigotry, would she have been received differently if she hailed instead from, say, Oxford, Mississippi?
I am trying to think of female writers from Mississippi in the 50s and 60s. Eudora Welty? When was she published? She was from Jackson and remained very low key all her life.
“I wonder though, concerning regional bigotry, would she have been received differently if she hailed instead from, say, Oxford, Mississippi?”
I don’t think it would have mattered. Mississippian John Grisham is viewed by the East Coast literati with utter contempt. Actually, not even contempt — just snickering. A lawyer! From Mississippi! What law school did you say he went to? Hilarious!
Faulkner’s acceptance was hard-won and grudging in academia. They can ignore his racist-redneck-Southerness because he’s looked on not so much as a Southerner but as a member of the Fraternity of Drunk Mad-as-a-Hatter writers. Hemingway’s brother if you will. And they looooooooove Hemingway. And drunks.
Other Southern women writers — McCullers, Welty — are safe from the wrath of the East Coast syndicate because they simply don’t sell like Harper Lee and are not such a threat to their cultural hegemony. Nobody else comes close to the numbers she sells every year.
P.S. Hemingway also wrote one good novel in his lifetime, though he kept trying. Nobody ever suggests he didn’t write “The Sun Also Rises.”