Books: Two True Sounds from Dixie

THE MORNING AND THE EVENING (248 pp.)—Joan Williams—Atheneum ($4)

THE MOVIEGOER (241 pp.) — Walker Percy—Knopf ($3.95).

It is always a surprise to find a good first novel, but it never is surprising to find that it comes from the South. From Harper Lee. whose To Kill a Mockingbird won this year's Pulitzer Prize, the list runs back to writers of remarkable quality. William Styron, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter are but a few whose first fiction showed them to be in full command of talents that some novelists fail to achieve in a lifetime. How do they get...