Recommended Reading

Many books have been written -- both fiction and nonfiction -- about this beloved city. And while most nonfiction can be taken for fact, many natives will tell you that a lot of the fiction holds nearly as many truths (and some not-so-secret skeletons) about Atlanta and the folks who've lived here through the decades.

Archival Atlanta: Forgotten Facts and Well-Kept Secrets from Our City's Past, by Perry Buffington and Kim Underwood, is a light read, packed with fascinating historical tidbits -- some of which are sure to surprise even the most knowledgeable Atlanta history buff. The book includes its share of humorous anecdotes.

For those more interested in looking at pictures than reading, Andy Ambrose, deputy director of the Atlanta History Center, compiled Atlanta: An Illustrated History, filled with images from Atlanta's archives. From the days of saloons and brothels in the early 1800s to the city's renaissance beginning in the 1960s, this account explores everything from Atlanta's troubling racial past to the celebrated, historically rich neighborhoods of Ansley Park and Buckhead.

Michael Rose's Atlanta Then and Now delivers an illustrated juxtaposition of Atlanta's past and present. The photos allow first-time visitors as well as old friends to see just how far this southern city has come in the past century.

For an account of some of the down-and-dirty backroom dealings that brought Hotlanta to the forefront as an international city, many readers swear by Frederick Allen's Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City 1946-1996. This mostly objective account of Atlanta's dealings over the past 50 years describes the relationships among the city's decision-makers as various events unfold.

Of course, Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind is a given for those who wish to take in a Civil War-era depiction of this area.

Author Fred Willard has a big following, which began with his Atlanta-based satirical mystery, Down on Ponce, and continued with Princess Naughty and the Voodoo Cadillac. Those folks who know the area intimately will swear to the authenticity of the Deep South social outcasts who inhabit a side of Atlanta that most residents would rather keep quiet.

Anne Rivers Siddons was reared just 20 miles from the big city, and Hills Town, King's Oak, and Homeplace are all set in Georgia. Her Peachtree Road is a dark, hypnotic tale of Buckhead high society in the mid-20th century, when money and civil rights were the fuel on which the city ran. Her Downtown depicts Atlanta's last years of innocence: "Atlanta in the autumn of 1966 was a city being born, and the energy and promise of that lying-in sent out subterranean vibrations all over the just-stirring South, like underground shock waves -- a call to those who could hear it best, the young. And they came, they came in droves, from small, sleeping towns and large, drowsing universities, from farms and industrial suburbs and backwaters so still that even the building firestorm of the civil rights movement had not yet rippled the surface."

And while he doesn't live in Atlanta, Tom Wolfe ruffled more than a few feathers with his 1998 tome A Man in Full. As Wolfe states in the book, Atlanta is a place "where your 'honor' is the thing you possess." More critics than not thought his depiction of the slums and socialites of Atlanta might do more harm than good in boosting the tourism economy here.