----THE----

COMPANION
TO

SOUTHERN
LITERATURE
-----cl~,-------
THEMES, GENRES, PLACES, PEOPLE,
MOVEMENTS, AND MOTIFS

EDITED BY

JOSEPH M. FLORA
AND

LUCINDA H. MACKETHAN

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

TODD TAYLOR

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS BATON ROUGE

(\ .n/J I'\
I 11 1 \/
Copyright © 2002 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing
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Designer: Barbara Neely Bourgoyne

Typeface: Serlio (display) and Sabon (text)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The companion to southern literature : themes, genres, places, people, movements, and
motifs / edited by Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda H. MacKethan ; associate editor, Todd Taylor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8071-2692-6 (cloth)
1. American literature-Southern States-Encyclopedias. 2. Southern
States-Intellectual life-Encyclopedias. 3. Southern States-In literature-Encyclopedias.
I. Flora, Joseph M. II. MacKethan, Lucinda Hardwick. III. Taylor, Todd W.

PS261 .C55 2001

810.9'975-dc21 2001029959

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. ©

hold their reunion at their family homeplace, bought in
the 1700s for fifty shillings by the earliest Thompsons.
The Copeland family in The Floatplane Notebooks
gathers at the family's graveyard that predates the Civil
War.
Storytelling and reminiscence are essential compo-
nents of southern family reunions. The reunion is an
occasion for older generations to pass stories and fam-
ily lore to younger family members. In Welty's Losing
Battles, stories are told throughout the afternoon. In
Souls Raised from the Dead, Frank Thompson visits
the family graveyard; books on family history are set
up on a table near the food. The Copeland family el-
ders in The Floatplane Notebooks tell stories about the
family's ancestors while the group cleans the graveyard
and talks. They work near an enormous, overgrown
wisteria vine, planted as a seedling by one of the early
Copelands, which symbolizes the sweetness and beauty
of the family gathering, as well as the family's intercon-
nectedness and promise of continued proliferation.
Mary Michaels 0. Estrada
See also Community; Family.
John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Re-
gional Culture (1982).
FAULKNER, WILLIAM
We are only beginning to gauge the magnitude of Wil-
liam Faulkner's literary achievement. Faulkner, who
won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, produced
nineteen novels between 1926 and 1962, and at least
six of these-The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay
Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absa-
lom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down,
Moses (1942)-are widely regarded as masterpieces of
world literature. Incredibly, this writer, who avoided
metropolitan literary centers and isolated himself in the
small Mississippi town of Oxford, appears to be exert-
ing an influence on world literature and culture compa-
rable only to Shakespeare's. As early as 1975, a survey
taken by the Modern Language Association revealed
that more criticism had been written about Faulkner
than any other modern writer; that the only authors
who had received more critical attention than Faulkner
were Shakespeare and Chaucer. And since 1975, as any
beleaguered Faulkner scholar can attest, Faulkner
Faulkner, William / 253
scholarship has increased dramatically. According to
recent surveys, over five hundred books have been pub-
lished about him or his work, and over seven hundred
doctoral dissertations on him have been completed.
Faulkner's novels apparently can be discussed end-
lessly, perhaps because they answer some unchanging
psychological need, perhaps because they reflect what
one Faulkner scholar has called "a continuous, turgid
thickness of meaning, the significant indefiniteness of
life itself." Not only southern or American writers but
writers from all over the world have expressed a pro-
found indebtedness to Faulkner. The nature of this
indebtedness may have been articulated most clearly by
French novelist Claude Simon, who, in a review in
Nouvelles litteraires (1971), explained that The Sound
and the Fury "truly revealed to me what writing could
be." But if Faulkner's novels teach writers to write,
they also teach readers to read. For example, when we
read Benjy's interior monologue in The Sound and the
Fury, we inhabit the consc10usness of a helpless, un-
comprehending man-child; we have no cultural mark-
ers to interpret experience; and we are forced to make
sense of a world of pure sensation, of sound and fury.
While it is impossible to identify the source of
Faulkner's greatness, we can note at least that Faulk-
ner's novels are subversive in the sense that they cease-
lessly question the assumptions on which our cultural
meanings rest. His works investigate the way we make
our meanings and the way we make ourselves in cul-
ture. Arguably, identity is Faulkner's central subject,
particularly gender identity and racial identity. With
regard to gender, in novel after novel-perhaps most
notably in The Sound and the Fury, Light in August,
and Absalom, Absalom!-Faulkner examines the slip-
page between male and female; that is, he examines the
way male inheres within female and female within
male. As for race-a subject conspicuously missing
from the work of most white Am~rican writers-in
novels published in 1932 and thereafter, Faulkner ex-
plodes racial stereotypes. In Light in August, for exam-
ple, Faulkner creates a character who resists all catego-
rizations, Joe Christmas, who may be white or African
American, and thus is neither, something we cannot
name. In the work that some call the greatest American
novel, Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner turns the narra-
tion over to four character-narrators, and his subject
becomes their construction of racial meanings-in par-
ticular, their erasure of blurred racial distinctions. In
discussing race, it perhaps also should be mentioned
that, after winning the Nobel Prize, Faulkner, an in-
254 I Faulkner, William
tensely private man, used his celebrity to speak out
against racial injustice in America, and that he used the
Nobel Prize award money as the basis for a foundation
that he charged with the aims of encouraging writers in
Latin America and of awarding university scholarships
to African American Mississippians.
Doreen Fowler
See also Double Dealer, The; Gothicism; Mississippi, Litera-
ture of; Mississippi, University of; New Orleans, Louisiana;
Oxford, Mississippi; Short-Story Cycles; Southern Renascence;
Virginia, University of.
Andre Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner's Novels
from "The Sound and the Fury" to "Light in August" (1990);
Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (1984); Doreen Fowler,
Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed (1997); John T. Irwin,
Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative
Reading of Faulkner (1975); Thomas L. McHaney, "Watching
for the Dixie Limited: Faulkner's Impact upon the Creative
Writer," in Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha, ed. Doreen Fowler
and Ann J. Abadie (1980); Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: The
House Divided (1983); Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and
Southern History (1993).
FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT
A division of the Works Project Administration (WPA),
the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was part of Frank-
lin Roosevelt's New Deal, providing wages and socially
beneficial work to thousands of otherwise unemployed
writers and researchers across the nation. Although the
agency was in existence from 1935 to 1943, its most
productive years were from 1935 to 1939, when it was
under the leadership of its first director, Henry G. Al-
ston.
Aside from giving relief to victims of the Great De-
pression, the FWP's primary objective was the publica-
tion of the American Guide series of auto-touring
guidebooks containing historical, cultural, and geo-
graphical items of interest for each state of the union.
Almost as an afterthought and at the insistence of Ster-
ling Brown and other African American writers associ-
ated with the FWP, its workers undertook from 1936
through 1938 the most ambitious collection and tran-
scription of slave narratives ever, interviewing more
than 2,200 former slaves and producing some ten
thousand pages of manuscript, which eventually re-
sulted in the publication of the sixteen-volume series,
The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography
(1972). Although its methods have been criticized-
most interviewers were southern whites, many of
whom displayed patronizing attitudes toward their
subjects that likely encouraged reticence or dissimula-
tion on the part of the former slaves-the FWP docu-
mented valuable eyewitness accounts that have been
used by later scholars to reconstruct a more complex,
balanced understanding of the mechanisms of oppres-
sion within the institution of human bondage.
At the urging of W. T. Couch, southern regional di-
rector of the FWP as well as head of the progressive
University of North Carolina Press, field workers in
Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina expanded
their scope beyond the accounts of former slaves to in-
clude the life histories of working-class southerners
from all walks of life. A sampling of these narratives
was published as These Are Our Lives in 1939, and in
1978 the University of North Carolina Press issued a
sequel of sorts titled Such As Us, which draws from the
body of work produced by the FWP.
A number of southern-born authors of note contrib-
uted their talents to the FWP. Zora Neale Hurston, one
of the few of these to conduct fieldwork in the southern
states, collected folklore in African American commu-
nities in Florida and contributed to the Florida guide-
book as well as to an unpublished manuscript, The
Florida Negro. In Chicago, Richard Wright composed
four of the stories collected in Uncle Tom's Children
(1938) and began work on his Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel, Native Son (1940), while on the FWP payroll.
Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, and Margaret Walker
are among other African American natives of the South
who worked for the FWP in the Chicago area. Al-
though Eudora Welty had some peripheral association
with the FWP in her native state of Missisippi, she was
actually employed as a publicist for the WPA; her pho-
tographs of Depression-era Mississippi were later pub-
lished in One Time, One Place (1971).
Under attack from congressional opponents of the
New Deal, the FWP was accused of boondoggling and,
more seriously, labeled as a hotbed of Communist ac-
tivity. Though some of its employees were found to be
or have been members of the Communist Party, investi-
gators found no evidence of widespread "infiltration";
nevertheless, the damage had been done and congres-
sional support for the FWP dwindled after hearings by
the House Committee on Un-American Activities in
1938. Shortly thereafter, its funding was severely cur-
tailed, Alston was replaced, and little fieldwork was
conducted in the last four years of its existence. The
462 I Louisiana State University
century curricula, although its offerings later broad-
ened because of changing national educational trends
during the early twentieth century. In 1935, LSU estab-
lished the LSU Press, the Southern Review, and the
Journal of Southern History as part of President James
Monroe Smith's effort to move LSU away from its
"aggie" image and place it in the forefront of southern
universities. Unfortunately, a wave of political and fi-
nancial scandals in 1939 involving state and university
administrators, among others, discredited Smith's vi-
sion for LSU. Wartime shortages then provided an ex-
cuse for the abolition of the Southern Review in 1942.
Robert Penn Warren and other notable literary figures
left at about the same time. The Southern Review was
reestablished in 1965.
Following World War II, LSU became a modern re-
search university. The study of languages, literatures,
and creative writing are among its diverse offerings but
no longer hold the pride of place that they did in the
1930s, when LSU was known as "Parnassus on the
Mississippi." The LSU Press has been an important
publisher of poetry since the 1960s and published,
among other works of southern fiction, John Kennedy
Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces, which won
the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Through its Voices of the
South series, the Press has made available in inexpen-
sive editions significant works of southern fiction that
have gone out of print. The Press has been a leader in
furthering southern historical and literary studies, and
its Southern Literary Studies series regularly adds to
the critical literature about southern writing.
Paul E. Hoffman
See also Southern Review; University Presses.
Biennial Report of the Louisiana State University and Agricul-
tural and Mechanical College to the Legislature of Louisiana
(1861- ; title varies somewhat}; Walter L. Fleming, Louisiana
State University, 1860-1896 (1936); Marcus M. Wilkerson,
Thomas Duckett Boyd: The Story of a Southern Educator
(1935).
LYNCHING
As much a political construct as a social one, lynching
refers to the extralegal act of punishing a presumed
criminal by hanging him or her by the neck until dead;
a combination of hanging and burning; a combination
of hanging and shooting-or shooting by itself; tarring
and feathering combined with burning; or any other
combination of these violent actions to bring about
death. African American literature took as one of its
primary subjects the depictions of lynchings of African
American people, and lynchings portrayed in the litera-
ture were frequently as ritualized as those that occurred
historically. William Wells Brown, who published the
first novel written by an African American, portrayed
a lynching in Clotel (1853); the "impudent" African
American man is executed for striking his master. Al-
though Brown passes rather quickly over the incident,
his successors would linger over such atrocities. Sutton
E. Griggs, writing at the turn of the twentieth century,
depicts a lynching in The Hindered Hand (1905) in
which an African American man and his wife are
lynched-but not before the lynchers drill huge pieces
of quivering flesh from their bodies in a torturing ritual
that goes on for more than three hours. Griggs's con-
temporary Paul Laurence Dunbar, who is often
thought to be anything but a protest writer, nonethe-
less focuses on lynching in "The Lynching of Jube Ben-
son" (1900), in which a white narrator, Dr. Melville,
relates his involvement in the lynching of the African
American man accused of raping and murdering the
narrator's fiancee. The man is proven innocent only
after he is lynched. In commenting on his inability to
resist mob violence against his former African Ameri-
can friend, Dr. Melville explains: "It's tradition."
Charles W. Chesnutt discusses the topic without the
ritual overtones in The Marrow of Tradition (1901).
Chesnutt makes clear the social purpose of lynching
rituals when one of his characters asserts: " 'Burn the
nigger,' reiterated McBane. 'We seem to have the right
nigger, but whether we have or not, burn q nigger. It is
an assault upon the white race, in the person of old
Mrs. Ochiltree, committed by the black race, in the
person of some nigger. It would justify the white people
in burning any nigger. The example would be all the
more powerful if we got the wrong one. It would serve
notice on the niggers that we shall hold the whole race
responsible for the misdeeds of each individual.' "
The Harlem Renaissance also brought its share of
writers interested in lynching; some published their
works in the 1920s, the decade identified with that
movement, and others would publish their works later.
Jean Toomer, in his experimental work Cane (1923),
includes a burning as a direct result of a conflict be-
tween an African American man and a white man over
an African American woman. Mild-mannered Lang-
ston Hughes, lover of the blues, depicts an African

American man who is lynched in "Home," a selection
from The Ways of White Folks (1933). The African
American man is too well dressed for the local whites,
and he dares to talk to his former music teacher, a
white woman, on the streets; whites heighten this en-
counter into the mythical rape. James Weldon Johnson
uses a lynching/burning in The Autobiography of An
Ex-Coloured Man (1912; 1927) as the incentive for his
protagonist to pass from being a light-skinned African
American man to being a white man; the irony is that,
in choosing not to be identified with people who can be
lynched, the narrator elects to identify with the lynch-
ers. Claude McKay, in "The Lynching" (1922), focuses
on the initiatory quality of lynching, whereas Johnson
in "Brothers-America Drama" (1935) depicts lynch-
ing from the point of view of the leader of the mob.
European American writers, especially in the third
and fourth decades of the twentieth century, also se-
lected lynching for literary representation. Erskine
Caldwell explores the subject in "Saturday Afternoon"
(1935), set in Georgia, in which a group of town loaf-
ers participate in the lynching of a harmless "good"
Negro purely out of boredom. Caldwell explored the
topic again in "Kneel to the Rising Sun" (also 1935),
in which an African American man is lynched for
standing up to a sharecropping landowner. William
Faulkner treats the ritualistic components of the prac-
tice in "Dry September" and the development of mob
psychology in Light in August (1932). Nedra Tyre in-
terviewed whites about their participation in lynchings
and reported her findings in Red Wine First (1947); her
descriptions of the tortures that one mob employed in
executing an African American man accused of rape
are not appreciably unlike those that African American
writers depict. As a southern white woman acutely
concerned with the racial situation, Lillian Smith also
took as one of her topics in Killers of the Dream (1949)
the summary killing of African American men. Her
novel Strange Fruit (1944) uses as its title a blues song
associated with lynching. More recently, it might bear-
gued that Eudora Welty's treatment of the death of
Medgar Evers in "Where Is the Voice Coming From?"
continues the focus on lynching or summary execution.
Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle (1993) is one of several
works dealing with the murder of a black boy, Emmett
Till, in 1955.
The fact that lynching has captured the imagina-
tions of every generation of African American writers
attests to its psychological and creative impacts. There
is almost an unstated agenda that any African Ameri-
Lynching / 463
can person writing in America, especially any African
American male, would eventually get around to actu-
ally depicting a lynching or dealing with the implica-
tions of it. In practically every instance, the African
American male is accused of sexual impropriety with a
white woman. Perhaps Richard Wright, more than any
other writer, captured the intensity of these tabooed
encounters. From "Between the World and Me," the
poem he published in 1935, through "Big Boy Leaves
Home" (1938), and ending with The Long Dream
(1958), the last novel he published before his death,
Wright was concerned about the negative conse-
quences of interactions between African American men
and white women. No explanation can satisfy the
white soldier who sees four nude African American
boys in the presence of his fiancee in "Big Boy Leaves
Home." They could not possibly have been swimming;
they could only have had raping sexual intentions, so
he shoots two of them dead before the other two over-
power him. A ritualized lynching occurs with one of
the remaining boys, and only Big Boy escapes. For
Wright, as for James Baldwin, the psychological di-
mensions of racial interactions in America are bound
up with sexuality; the two cannot be separated.
Baldwin's powerful depiction of this thesis occurs in
"Going to Meet the Man" (1965) and is implied in al-
most all of his work. In the story named, a white sheriff
uses the memory of a lynching to overcome his impo-
tence with his wife. As he relives his initiation at the
lynching, he is inspired by the implied transfer of sex-
ual potency from the African American victim to him-
self as the African American man is castrated. Bald-
win's story is perhaps the last in the literature in which
excruciatingly graphic details of torture and castration
are inclusive features of the lynching/burning rituals,
but other writers nonetheless continue to focus on the
implications of the consequences of African American
male/white female interactions. Where no ritual oc-
curs, or where no physical lynching takes place, there
is still an overwhelming sense of the possibility of such
an occurrence.
Male writers in far greater numbers than African
American women writers have been drawn to depicting
lynchings in their works. Historical statistics would
certainly suggest that African American men have been
more vulnerable than African American women.
Whether it was Ida Wells-Barnett's male friend being
too successful as a grocer in Memphis, or Richard
Wright's uncle being lynched for owning a prosperous
saloon in Elaine, Arkansas, the possibility of African
 464 I Lynching
American men losing their lives through lynching was
ever constant. The threat of death, combined with the
more psychologically wearing fear of castration, per-
haps led African American male writers to identify
with their historical counterparts much more intensely.
Although African American male writers are the
primary depictors of graphic lynching scenes, African
American women writers nonetheless treat the subject.
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, sev-
eral African American women playwrights claimed the
lynching theme as their special focus, sometimes in
plays as short as five or six pages. These include Ange-
lina Grimke's Rachel (1916-full-length play), Geor-
gia Douglas Johnson's "A Sunday Morning in the
South" (1925) and "Blue-Eyed Black Boy" (1935?),
and Mary P. Burrill's "Aftermath" (1928). It is striking
in these works that all the lynchings take place before
the current action or offstage; that way, these women
writers can treat lynching minus the graphic depictions
so characteristic of African American male writers.
More contemporarily, in Jubilee (1966) Margaret
Walker portrays the lynching of two African American
slave women accused of having poisoned their masters;
the occasion is used as an object lesson for other en-
slaved persons. Alice Walker uses the discovery of a
lynching rope in "The Flowers" (1973) as the moment
when a young African American girl is initiated into
the harsh realities of her segregated world. The threat
of lynching pervades Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa
Rose (1986), and Toni Morrison depicts the burning of
Sixo, one of the African American men on the Sweet
Home Plantation, in Beloved (1987). Where lynching
is not portrayed, it is a frequent metaphor, as in the
case of Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Chicago Defender
Sends a Man to Little Rock," in which she declares in
the last line, "The loveliest lynchee was our Lord."
With all of these writers, lynching has saturated
their works as thoroughly as the process by which they
have claimed their space to be writers in America.
Every one of them has written contemporarily with the
occurrence of a lynching or some other form of sum-
mary execution. Every one of them has been aware of
this constant threat to African American existence.
And every one has recognized that, though lynching
could certainly end the lives of its victims, it could not
kill the creative imagination determined to bring
change to the American landscape.
Trudier Harris
See also Lynch Law; Racism.
Jerry H. Bryant, Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the Af-
rican American Novel (1997); Charles W. Chesnutt, The Mar-
row of Tradition (1901); Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness:
Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984);
Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (1965); Lillian
Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949).
LYNCH LAW
In August 1997, three white men in Elk Creek, Vir-
ginia, poured gasoline on an African American man
and burned him to death. In June 1998, three white
men in Jasper, Texas, dragged a retarded African
American man behind their pick-up truck until he died.
These summary executions, or lynchings, which are
modern derivations of lynch law, were the most recent
in almost two hundred years of such violence against
persons of African descent upon American soil. Lynch
law refers specifically to ordinary citizens assuming the
right to execute persons judged to be guilty of a crime;
in these modern instances, the "crime" was simply
being African American. "Lynching" is the process of
carrying out the judgment. Some scholars report that
the phrase lynch law is said to have derived from the
practices of Virginian Charles Lynch, who, during the
Revolutionary War, summarily hanged Tories caught
in the area.
For observers who believed the practice had ended
in the United States, the 1997 and 1998 incidents
brought back thoughts of the 1890s, the peak years for
lynching in this country. In 1892, 1893, and 1894, an
average of two hundred African American people were
lynched each year. Indeed, it could be argued that
lynching almost became a nationally sanctioned pas-
time, for even in the years in which most deaths oc-
curred, it was impossible to get national legislation
passed to condemn or terminate the practice. The Dyer
Anti-Lynching Bill, which had several sponsors and
was presented in Congress on repeated occasions, was
never made into law. How could lynching be outlawed,
so the logic ran, when African American men were still
prone to rape white women? Accusations of rape,
which were the most emotional cause of mob-inspired
lynchings (though other presumed crimes were more
numerous), were frequently the incentive that creative
artists used to shape their depictions of lynchings. As
creators who drew their subject matter from the sub-
stance of the lives of the people about whom they

wrote, African American writers throughout their his-
tory in America have depicted occurrences in which Af-
rican American characters have been lynched, burned,
shot, and otherwise executed in whatever version of
summary execution was operative at the time. They
joined with political activists from the mid-nineteenth
century through the mid-twentieth century in waging
a battle of public opinion against such barbarian acts
directed toward African Americans.
Lynch and lynching have undergone a series of
meanings in American history. Both refer to summary
justice or execution-that is, regular citizens taking the
law into their own hands, which in the early develop-
ment of the country occurred in the frontier states, but
definitions of summary justice varied. It could refer to
whipping, or tarring and feathering, or to being ridden
out of town on a rail. "Lynch's law" meant that pun-
ishment for a crime had been meted out without a
court hearing, or by a self-constituted court. To be "se-
verely lynched" could mean that an individual had re-
ceived one hundred lashes, or that the person had been
whipped, then tarred and feathered. A man could be
lynched, then hanged, or lynched, then run out of
town.
James E. Cutler, one of the prominent scholars of
lynching history, points out that "previous to 1840 the
verb lynch was occasionally used to include capital
punishment, but the common and general use was to
indicate a personal castigation of some sort. 'To lynch'
had not then undergone a change in meaning and ac-
quired the sense of 'to put to death.' ... It was not until
a time subsequent to the Civil War that the verb lynch
came to carry the idea of putting to death." In the dec-
ades following the Civil War, lynching came to include
a range of activities that always resulted in death.
These included tarring and feathering, burning, shoot-
ing, and other tortures in addition to and in combina-
tion with "hanging by the neck until dead." Equally
noticeable, these atrocious additions were more often
than not applied when the victims were African Amer-
ican.
Early advocates of legislation to end lynching com-
bined the literary and the political. Ida Wells-Barnett,
who wrote newspaper columns as early as the 1880s
admonishing African American people to leave Mem-
phis, Tennessee-where a grocer friend of hers had
been lynched for owning a store that was too profitable
for his white competition-also wrote pamphlets item-
izing the atrocities. In Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in
All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record: Tabulated Statis-
Lynch Law / 465
tics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United
States, 1892-1893-1894 (1895), and Mob Rule in Old
New Orleans (1900), she offered disclaimers that
lynching occurred as a result of African American men
raping white women. Instead, she asserted that clan-
destine, voluntary transracial liaisons between African
American men and white women ended in lynching
when the affairs were discovered and the white women
cried rape. She further asserted, as with the Memphis
case, that lynchings also occurred for economic rea-
sons. This violent brutality was therefore not only a
means of psychological control but a political device of
social control as well.
Lynching was not always targeted to African
Americans. Initially, it was the preferred form of pun-
ishment on the American frontier. After the Civil War,
it became a means of keeping newly freed African
Americans, especially African American males, in line.
Researchers of lynching history, including Cutler and
Robert L. Zangrando, maintain that nearly four thou-
sand African American people were lynched between
1880 and 1927. Women made up a small percentage
of that number (Cutler asserts that seventy-six women
were lynched). These numbers reflect recorded statis-
tics, which means that it will never be possible to deter-
mine the exact number of African American persons
lynched in America. Many of these executions were rit-
ualized, in that they evolved to contain features that
were repeated again and again. A white mob gathered
to punish an offender by lynching or burning. Total
community sanction-if not direct involvement-
characterized the gathering. Frequently, white people
brought food and drink to the place of execution, and
announcements of the execution often preceded the
event. For the famous Henry Smith lynching in Paris,
Texas, in 1895, for example, flyers were printed and
announcements were made in local newspapers; excur-
sion trains were run to the site of the lynching to ac-
commodate the crowds (Smith was accused of rape and
murder). The ritual often included a castration or a
gathering of souvenirs (ears, toes, fingers) from the
body of the African American victim. These occasions
were used as rites of initiation for young white chil-
dren. White women, even pregnant ones, were also at
times in attendance at such gatherings.
W. E. B. Du Bois made the recording of lynching
statistics a regular part of the agenda of Crisis maga-
zine. Years later, Zangrando would publish The
NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950
(1980). Walter White, who became executive director
466 I Lynch Law
of the NAACP, was a soldier in the war against lynch-
ing before his administrative duty. Blond hair, pale
skin, and blue eyes allowed this "white" African Amer-
ican man into the company of many lynchers in small
southern towns and enabled him to publish "I Investi-
gate Lynching," an "insider's" view of the practice.
Lynching was constantly before the African American
public, and in the early 1930s a group of white women
joined the antilynching efforts. Jessie Daniel Ames and
other white women organized to protest the assertion
by white southern males that lynchings took place to
save the honor of white women. Ames and her col-
leagues pledged to descend upon any town where an
African American man was accused of white rape and
put their bodies in the way of summary justice; they
also wrote to sheriffs and governors, met with African
American organizations, and gathered evidence about
the real reasons for lynching. Their efforts, though
commendable, did not eradicate the practice from
southern soil or from the southern literary imagina-
tion. African American and European American writ-
ers would return to the topic again and again as they
sought to depict the tensions and violence inherent in
race relations.
Trudier Harris
See also Lynching.
Bettina Aptheker, ed., Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of
Views by Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells (1977); Jerry H. Bry-
ant, Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African Ameri-
can Novel (1997); James E. Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investiga-
tion into the History of Lynching in the United States (1905);
John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of
Negro Americans (1967); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt
Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Cam-
paign Against Lynching (1979); Trudier Harris, Exorcising
Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Ritu-
als (1984); Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American
Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1969);James R. Mc-
Govern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal
(1982); NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States,
1889-1918 (1969); Arthur R. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching
(1933); Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography ofJudge
Lynch (1929); Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade
Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (1980).
 514 I Mobile, Alabama
the film version of Forrest Gump (1986), which like
Groom's As Summers Die (1980), also made into a
movie, draws from a native's knowledge of the city and
its environs. Two affecting portrayals of youthful expe-
rience on Mobile Bay's Eastern Shore, Robert Bell's
The Butterfly Tree (1959) and Mark Childress's V for
Victor (1988), provide fine unrealized film possibility.
Making his mark first as a musician, Mobile and Mar-
garitaville denizen Jimmy Buffett has also scored re-
spectably as a writer of Gulf Coast fiction.
The books that best capture the unique essence of
twentieth-century Mobile in fiction are Julian Lee Ray-
ford's Cottonmouth (1941), Eugene Walter's The Un-
tidy Pilgrim (1954) and The Byzantine Riddle (1985),
and Franklin Daugherty's Isle of Joy (1997). Consid-
ered chronologically, these four move from the obvi-
ously autobiographical to the more imaginative, from
classic emotional local-color realism through the spar-
kling bittersweet to sardonic hilarity. While Rayford
sensuously recreates the earthy street milieu of Mobile,
Walter provides introduction to the wonderfully idio-
syncratic but typical characters of a higher realm of
city society. Daugherty's witty satire is his account of
an attempt to make Mobile postmodern without its
ever having gotten to modernism. All born here, Ray-
ford (1908-1980), Walter (1921-1998), and Daugh-
erty (1950- ) had long and distant residences else-
where before each was drawn back to live in his city by
the bay.
A number of contemporary creators of poetry and
nonfiction prose call Mobile home even if they inhabit
other places. While poets Patricia Storace and Julie Suk
and memorialist Frye Gaillard reside at least several
states northward, Sue Walker and Jay Higginbotham
continue to live and write in Mobile. To all, however,
the city is a muse. More fittingly called "Port Paradox"
in the view of Eugene Walter, it has been extraordi-
narily, compellingly inspirational to writers for almost
three centuries.
Bert Hitchcock
See also Alabama, Literature of.
Caldwell Delaney, A Mobile Sextet (1981); Tom Franklin and
Barry R. Nowlin, eds., Mobile Bay Tales: Essays & Stories
About a Region (1991).
MODERNISM
Taking modernism to be the twentieth-century literary
movement that in the West follows literary realism and
naturalism, one finds that easily recognizable traces of
the imagist aesthetic championed by Ezra Pound and
the experimental novel perfected by James Joyce began
to appear with increasing frequency in southern works
published after 1922. Less-obvious indicators of the
emerging aesthetic are discernible, however, in Ellen
Glasgow's experiment with French Symbolism in The
Deliverance (1904), wherein she uses an elderly lady
unrealistically rendered blind by the northern invasion
to represent, in the manner of Maurice Maeterlinck,
the mind-set that the South often fell into following the
Civil War. In the same period, James Branch Cabell
was writing, in the guise of romances, biting satires
often compared to the fiction of Anatole France. Ca-
bell's later use of Freudian subjects and symbols, again
in the guise of historical romance, especially in Jurgen
(1919), showed that a modern spirit was replacing the
old sense of loyalty and nostalgia that too frequently
marked southern writing before Glasgow began her
campaign of critical realism.
In 1922 the first issue of the Fugitive magazine ap-
peared in Nashville, Tennessee, providing an outlet for
poems by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert
Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, and other writers in-
tent on bringing American poetry into the contempo-
rary movement by applying lessons learned from a va-
riety of modernist and premodernist poets including
Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Ransom was
especially accomplished in writing tight, crisp stanzas
informed by ironic satire, sharp images drawn from na-
ture, and a diction employing brilliant anachronisms
much the way Emily Dickinson had done. Among his
best works are his dramatic and bitter defense of loy-
alty to the southern soil, "The Antique Harvesters,"
and the caution against lovers who fail to seize the day,
"The Equilibrists." Davidson exhibited modernist po-
etic savvy when he treated the saintly Robert E. Lee
with dramatic irony in "Lee in the Mountains" (1938).
In 1926 Tate published an early version of "Ode to the
Confederate Dead," among the greatest southern
poems in that it dramatizes the conflict at the heart of
many southerners in the early twentieth century be-
tween an obligatory loyalty to the place and its past he-
roes, on the one hand, and a saner need to join with
the rhythms of nature in order to avoid the "ravenous
grave" that dwelling on the past becomes.
Southern fiction quickly assimilated modernist tech-
niques when Evelyn Scott, Jean Toomer, and Glasgow
experimented during the early 1920s with varying
combinations of impressionism, stream of conscious-

ness, and symbolic realism. Scott's Narrow House
(1921) and Narcissus (1922) made important early
contributions in these areas, as did Toomer's Cane
(1923), the most brilliant book from the Harlem Re-
naissance of the 1920s. Here Toomer develops a poetic
version of rural African American speech, gives the
agrarian enterprise a spiritual dimension, and employs
the figure of the Black Madonna in the suggestive fash-
ion that Joyce's mythic method perfected in Ulysses
(1922). Glasgow's Barren Ground (1925) similarly in-
vokes the Jason and Medea myth to parallel a story of
the contemporary South while exploiting resources of
modern psychology, both Freudian and Jungian, for
characterization, for symbols, and in stream-of-con-
sciousness presentations. Her The Romantic Comedi-
ans (1926) created a complex and "sound psychology"
in order to contrast the calcified thinking of tradition
with the "babbling" modern spirit.
· In 1929, to ignore the influence of modernist ap-
proaches on southern fiction was no longer possible,
for in that year Thomas Wolfe published Look Home-
ward, Angel and William Faulkner, The Sound and the
Fury; the two southerners thereby emerged as leading
American practitioners of the modernist novel pio-
neered by Joyce. Wolfe's first novel combined a Freud-
ian perspective of culture derived from Sherwood An-
derson with a view of the artist echoing D. H.
Lawrence and Joyce, among others. The most obvious
modernist features, however, were a series of devices
borrowed from Ulysses. These include experiments
with stream of consciousness, peripatetic chapters
composed of discontinuous scenes, a catechistic chap-
ter, frequent mythic allusions and mythic structural
parallels, parodies that unmask the disguised sexual
content of childhood adventure and romance stories,
and shifts in style that range from rich vernacular dia-
logues and mock-epic narrations to intensely lyrical,
even rhymed, descriptions. The chapter that sets
roughly fifty familiar quotations from revered English
poems in irreverent contexts echoes The Waste Land
rather than Ulysses.
If Wolfe's use of Joyce was both flashy and subtle,
Faulkner's experiments were subtle and challenging.
Wolfe's absorption of the new aesthetic sometimes
went skin-deep; Faulkner's soaked to the core. His
Benjy episode may sound like Hemingway, his Jason
like Huck Finn, but his Quentin is Stephen Dedalus's
fraternal twin. Although Faulkner would continue
with Joycean shifts of style and point of view as he
wrote As I Lay Dying (1930), he, like Wolfe, felt com-
Modernism / 515
pelled to develop a voice of his own, the way he was
already doing in the Dilsey section of The Sound and
the Fury. Faulkner's evolution led to the time-enriched
prose found in Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absa-
lom! (1936), and the later fictions. Wolfe seems to have
looked to the early work in progress from Joyce's Fin-
negans Wake (1939) and to the fiction of Proust to
craft the language and time experiments that distin-
guish Of Time and the River, which Scribner's pub-
lished in 1935, before the novelist completed his revi-
sions. His later posthumous, unfinished fictions reflect
the satirical style of Sinclair Lewis and the pared-down
expectations of much fiction published during the
Great Depression, but Wolfe never wrote as sparely as
his Mississippian contemporary, Richard Wright.
Since Wolfe and Faulkner, modernist approaches
have been a mainstay of southern writing. Southern
poets often employ a sort of "country surrealism" per-
fected by James Dickey, although the confessional im-
pulse explored by Robert Lowell and associates influ-
enced the later Robert Penn Warren, Dave Smith,
James Seay, and others. In fiction, Katherine Anne Por-
ter, Warren, and Eudora Welty made distinctive use of
modernist methods in fictions such as Porter's "The Jilt-
ing of Granny Weatherall" (1929), Warren's All the
King's Men (1946), and Welty's The Golden Apples
(1949). As late modernism incorporated the elements
of existential thought, it continued to dominate the
method of Walker Percy and the early John Barth, the
latter soon to emerge as leader of American postmod-
ernists. A number of significant southern novelists, in-
cluding Reynolds Price, Doris Betts, Anne Tyler, Harry
Crews, Lee Smith, and Cormac McCarthy, continue to
exploit the varied resources of modernism, although
from time to time their fictions exhibit tendencies iden-
tified with minimalist, ultraviolent, confessional, magi-
cal realist, and postmodern writing.
In literary criticism, Ransom, Tate, Warren, and
Cleanth Brooks led the New Critical wing of American
modernism with their essays, books, anthologies, and
textbooks. In southern drama, Lillian Hellman began
treating modern psychosexual issues as early as 1934
in The Children's Hour and larger cultural problems in
The Little Foxes (1939). By far the greatest southern
playwright of the modern period was Tennessee Wil-
liams, whose 1944 drama The Glass Menagerie (1945)
remains a masterpiece combining expressionist and
surreal elements with the story of a sensitive young
man's family as southern as Wolfe's Gants or Faulk-
ner's Compsons. While experimenting here and there
 516 / Modernism
with other techniques, contemporary southern play-
wrights such as Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Preston
Jones, and Horton Foote work chiefly within a mod-
ernist-realist aesthetic.
Julius Rowan Raper
See also Postmodernism.
Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (1984); Cleanth
Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939); David Her-
bert Donald, Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe
(1987); Frederick J. Hoffman, The Art of Southern Fiction
(1967); C. Hugh Holman, Three Modes of Southern Fiction:
Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe (1966);
John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (1938) and The New
Criticism (1941); Julius Rowan Raper, From the Sunken Gar-
den: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916-1945 (1980); Louis
D. Rubin Jr., Writers of the Modern South: The Faraway
Country (1963); Tjebbe A. Westendop, Robert Penn Warren
and the Modernist Temper (1987).
MULATTO
Mulatto, a term used to define a person of mixed ances-
try, specifically part black (African) and part white (Eu-
ropean), originated from the word mule, on the prem-
ise that such a union would produce a sterile offspring.
The earliest recorded use of the word as racial designa-
tion is in Drake's Voyage (1595). In the U.S., the term
took on political, legal, and economic significance dur-
ing slavery, particularly with the 1662 passing of a Vir-
ginia statute prohibiting intermarriage and relegating
mixed-race children to the status of the black mother.
This statute had the effect of condoning the rape of
black women by white men while affirming the social
need for racial purity. But such laws as the Virginia
statute could not prevent the inevitable: that some peo-
ple of mixed race would "pass" as white, living among
and marrying white people. Even as most states in the
late 1700s were defining mulattos as those with one-
quarter black ancestry, the literal determination was
less scientific and based heavily on behavior and physi-
cal appearance. Eventually, "mulatto" came generally
to refer to all people of mixed race, including qua-
droons and octoroons. The growing numbers of such
people in black communities helped to create more
complex hierarchies of color and bondage within and
outside of those communities. For example, lighter-
skinned slaves, often the master's offspring, were usu-
ally assigned housework. Furthermore, where earned
freedom was possible, they were more likely to be set
free. Thus, in 1850, only 7 percent of slaves were con-
sidered mulatto, but 43 percent of free blacks in the
South were so classified. Clearly then, as a literary and
social trope, "mulatto" is an unstable category, calling
into question the notion of fixed racial identity. It is in
this context that issues of racial "science" were hotly
contested, especially after the Civil War. Works by
white supremacists, such as Thomas Dixon's The
Leopard's Spots (1902), presented racial purity as a
matter of biological survival; and, on the other hand,
works by African Americans, as in the scientific studies
collected in the Atlanta University Publications (edited
by W. E. B. Du Bois beginning in 1898), showed that
there was no scientific case "against the intermingling
of the world's races," and disproved-by demonstra-
ting the sound physical, mental, and moral health of
mulattos-the idea that people of mixed race were "de-
generates." African American novelists made this case
as well, as in Charles Chesnutt's House Behind the Ce-
dars (1900) or James Weldon Johnson's Autobiogra-
phy of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912).
The mulatto tradition in southern literature is com-
plicated particularly by two factors: the author's racial/
cultural self-identity, and the gender of the mulatto
character. The first issue-the racial designation of the
author-is often crucial to how the mulatto character
is engaged in the literary work. In the tradition of Afri-
can American literature, mulatto characters are em-
ployed in early fiction, for example Harriet Wilson's
Our Nig (1859) and William Wells Brown's Clotel
(1853); and in slave narratives, most notably Harriet
Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).
These uses often reveal the complexity of race in slave
life, specifically the tensions created by hierarchies of
race and color; highlight rape (of black women by
white slave owners) and hypocrisy (concerning conju-
gal relations between black men and white women,
and in rare cases, between black women and white
men); and deny the doctrine of racial superiority/inferi-
ority. Mulatto characters such as Sappho Clark in Pau-
line Hopkins's Contending Forces (1900) or William
Miller in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition
(1901) underscore not only the falsity of race con-
structs but also the moral implications of such con-
structs. Though some critics have asserted that mulatto
characters often function as a valorization of whiteness
and an internalization of black racial inferiority, recent
criticism has held to the idea of the mulatto as a politi-
cally and rhetorically deconstructive device that, as
 544 I New Orleans, Louisiana
man, Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, and Sherwood
Anderson. William Faulkner, who wrote his first novel
in the French Quarter in 1925, spent two formative
years there, and Tennessee Williams, who arrived in the
city as an unknown and struggling author in 1938,
soon came to love it as his home and to write some of
his best work in the city and about it. Currently, a
number of noted authors, including Richard Ford and
Julie Smith, have residences in the city. Contemporary
writers Ishmael Reed, Ellen Gilchrist, Sheila Bosworth,
and John Kennedy Toole have kept the reputation of
New Orleans as a vibrant, swinging city very much
alive.
W. Kenneth Holditch
See also Louisiana, Literature of.
Violet Harrington Bryan, The Myth of New Orleans in Litera-
ture (1993); Richard S. Kennedy, ed., Literary New Orleans
(1992) and Literary New Orleans in the Modern World
(1998); Walker Percy, "New Orleans, Mon Amour" in Sign-
posts in a Strange Land (1991); Lyle Saxon, New Orleans City
Guide (1938).
NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE
By the 1980s, the Times-Picayune had become the only
daily general-circulation newspaper in New Orleans,
having in the past century absorbed several others-the
Crescent, the Times, the Democrat, the States, and the
Item, for example. Founded as the Picayune in 1837,
the paper took its name from a small coin called the pi-
caillon (Anglicized to "picayune"), valued at about six
cents, the cost of the paper. The founders, George Wil-
kins Kendall and Francis Asbury Lumsden, wanted to
modernize the press in New Orleans so that their publi-
cation would reflect advances being made in big-city
papers in the North. The result of their efforts was an
entirely new kind of journalism, not only in New Or-
leans, but in the South in general, and numerous inno-
vations are credited to them and their successors at the
paper.
Noted writers who worked for the Picayune and the
various journals that ultimately were incorporated
with it include Walt Whitman, Joel Chandler Harris,
George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Mark
Twain, 0. Henry (William Sydney Porter), Lyle Saxon,
Roark Bradford, and several of the founders of The
Double Dealer, the literary journal that flourished in
the 1920s. When William Faulkner was living in the
French Quarter in 1925, the Picayune's night city edi-
tor, Roark Bradford, a noted fiction writer in his own
right, contracted with him for several short sketches,
which were published in the paper under the rubric
"Mirrors of Chartres Street." Later they were collected
in a volume entitled New Orleans Sketches (1959).
Among the innovations credited to the newspaper
was the first use of a pony-express service to deliver
dispatches to New Orleans and thence to other parts
of the country. In addition, when Eliza Jane Poitevent
Holbrook assumed the role of publisher and editor in
1876 after the death of her husband, who had owned
and operated the Picayune, she became probably the
first woman ever to hold such positions with a major
metropolitan newspaper. Earlier, as a reporter for the
paper, Mrs. Holbrook, using the pseudonym Pearl Riv-
ers, had written and published poetry and essays, ex-
panded the literary page, and added both a women's
page and a children's page, which were among the first
in any paper in the country. One journalist whom Mrs.
Holbrook employed was Elizabeth Gilmer, who, writ-
ing under her pseudonym "Dorothy Dix," created the
world's first letters-to-the-lovelorn column, which was
syndicated in numerous journals.
In 1878, Eliza Jane Holbrook married the business
manager of the paper, George Nicholson, and together
they published and edited the Picayune and used it to
campaign for reform in government and for other im-
provements in the community. Soon it became one of
the major newspapers in the country, a reputation it re-
tained until well into the twentieth century. It remained
in the Nicholson family until the 1950s, when they lost
financial control, and it was subsequently swallowed
up in the nationwide conglomerate of Newhouse news-
papers.
W. Kenneth Holditch
See also Newspapers.
Charles L. Dufour, Ten Flags in the Wind (1967); Kenneth Hol-
ditch, "A Creature Set Apart," in Mississippi's Piney Woods,
ed. Noel Polk (1986); Lyle Saxon, New Orleans City Guide
(1938).
NEW SOUTH
The dream of a New South was being born as the real-
ity of the Old South was going down the red gullet of

war. In the years immediately following the Confedera-
cy's defeat, increasing numbers of southerners began to
work to make the dream come true by embracing the
New South creed. Many of the most effective propo-
nents of the creed, which reached its peak in the 1880s,
were the editors or publishers of major newspapers or
journals: Richard H. Edmonds of the Baltimore Manu-
facturers' Record, Henry Watterson of the Louisville
Courier-Journal, Daniel A. Tompkins of the Charlotte
Observer, Francis W. Dawson of the Charleston News
and Courier, and Henry W. Grady of the Atlanta Con-
stitution. From his desk at the Constitution's offices
and from the podium at various gatherings, Grady
emerged as the preeminent advocate of the new ideol-
ogy. His "New South" speech, delivered to the mem-
bers of an elite club in New York City late in 1886, co-
gently and movingly presented a vision of the new
order.
Grady and other leaders of the New South move-
ment believed that economic recovery was the region's
most pressing need. To effect that recovery, they pro-
moted industrial growth, which, they believed, could
occur sufficiently only with infusions of outside capital.
Investments adequate enough to finance industrializa-
tion depended on bringing about sectional reconcilia-
tion by diminishing the animosities aroused during the
Civil War and Reconstruction. Reconciliation, in turn,
could come about only if potential investors in the
North and in Europe were satisfied that racial har-
mony, which was essential to the social stability that
attracted investments, had been achieved in the South.
Grady and other spokesmen of the movement assured
influential outsiders that black southerners were being
treated fairly, that white southerners harbored no bit-
terness toward the North, and that the South was on
the threshold of limitless prosperity. As New South
spokesmen sought to wreak a radical transformation
of the region from a rural, agricultural society to an
urban, industrial one, they were careful to pledge alle-
giance to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. They
probably could not have done otherwise, but they did
not perceive the irony.
By the time of Grady's death in 1889 at the age of
thirty-nine, a program of action had become a declara-
tion of accomplishment. Falling victim to wishful
thinking, the proponents of the new ethos convinced
themselves that their dream had become reality. The
New South idea had entered the realm of myth. The
mythic New South was a land of material opulence and
New South I 545
racial justice where, in Grady's words, there was "sun-
shine everywhere and all the time."
The New South creed, victorious in the 1880s, re-
treated briefly in the 1890s under the onslaught of Pop-
ulism, a response to economic depression and a move-
ment intended to help poor farmers, which is what
most southerners were. Although Populism was the
strongest of all the challenges to Gilded Age capitalism,
it nonetheless failed to achieve its objectives. As the
twentieth century began, the New South ideology re-
emerged, reaching its peak in the 1920s. There were
many parallels between the New South enthusiasm of
the 1920s and that of theJ880s. Atlanta was the center
of 1920s boosterism just as it had been the chief locus
of 1880s boomerism. The hyperbole that accompanied
the industrial crusade of the 1920s rivaled that of the
earlier period. Ironically, the much-ballyhooed indus-
trial progress of the "dollar decade" occurred during a
period of severe agricultural depression, just as had
been the case for much of the 1880s.
So durable was the New South ideology that, de-
spite being eclipsed briefly in the Great Depression, it
reappeared with full intensity before the 1930s ended.
Shortly thereafter, World War II ushered in a degree of
industrialization that southern promoters had long
dreamed of. As the region's economic advance became
ever more real, the New South myth grew ever more
compelling. Even so, at the end of the twentieth cen-
tury, despite more than a hundred years of industrial
promotion-whether by the boomers of the 1880s, the
boosters of the 1920s, or the Sunbelt enthusiasts of
the postwar era-the South remained at the bottom of
the nation's economic ladder.
Literary treatment of the New South myth flour-
ished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, when the idea was new. There were compelling
reasons for southern writers to embrace the new ideol-
ogy. On a purely personal level, southern writers, after
the unpleasantness of Reconstruction was over, usually
depended on the North to sustain them because north-
erners, far more than southerners, bought and read
their works. During the ascendancy of the New South
idea, which coincided with the increasing popularity of
local-color fiction, virtually every southern writer of
note was discovered by the editors of northern literary
magazines. The same houses that published those mag-
azines often brought out southern works in book form,
too. Through its ties to the North, the New South
opened doors to writers that had been closed before.
Consequently, many of them set about exploiting the
 546 I New South
raw materials of literature just as the industrial boom-
ers tried to develop economic resources. The writers
.gave northern readers what they wanted: stories of the
idyllic old plantation, tales of wartime valor, vignettes
of exotic Creoles, portraits of picturesque mountain-
eers, and anything else unusual enough to arouse Yan-
kee interest.
Beyond professional considerations, southern writ-
ers could feel the strong pull of the New South ideol-
ogy. It offered hope amid despair, opportunity when
for too long little had existed, and the possibility of cul-
tural attainment through material progress. Moreover,
the new ideology was intellectually respectable-pub-
licists, politicians, businessmen, clergymen, and acade-
micians espoused it.
Despite the many attractions of the New South idea,
writers whose careers had begun in the antebellum pe-
riod and extended well into the postbellum era re-
sponded ambivalently. In The Heir of Gaymount
(1870), John Esten Cooke ignored the existence of in-
dustrialization and hoped that the New South would
be a land of diversified farming. Cooke's contempo-
rary, the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne, attempted to rec-
oncile material progress with the pastoral ideal in "The
Exposition Ode" (1881), and in "To the New South"
(1885) he urged the New South to honor the Old
South.
A few writers adopted the new ideology unequivo-
cally. Ironically, among the most artful proponents of
the new order were the plantation romancers F. Hop-
kinson Smith and Thomas Nelson Page. In Smith's
Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891) and Page's Gor-
don Keith (1903), the past, presented in such a way as
to be merely picturesque, serves to reinforce the New
South movement because the agrarian way does not
offer a viable alternative. The most sustained support
of the new ideology occurs in the work of Will N. Har-
ben, who celebrated the growth of industry and the rise
of the middle class in a number of novels published
early in the twentieth century, most notably Abner
Daniel (1902) and The Georgians (1904). The New
South idea was so popular that it engaged the attention
of Thomas Dixon Jr., who was primarily concerned
with disseminating his viciously racist views in his Re-
construction trilogy: The Leopard's Spots (1902), The
Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907). In each of
those novels, sympathetically drawn characters estab-
lish cotton mills, the quintessential symbol of the New
South movement.
Much more numerous among writers than advo-
cates of the New South movement were detractors who
tended to oppose either the very idea of industrializa-
tion or its exploitative nature. Many of the finest south-
ern writers from the Civil War to World War I rejected
the New South myth. In poems such as "Corn" (1875)
and "Sunrise" (1882) and in the essay "The New
South" (1880), Sidney Lanier extolled the glories of na-
ture and the yeoman ideal and rejected the industrial
way. Joel Chandler Harris, often considered by critics
to be a plantation romancer, nonetheless wrote much
fiction that praised the yeoman, not the plantation,
ideal and disparaged the New South myth, notably cer-
tain stories published in the following works: Uncle
Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Mingo and
Other Sketches in Black and White (1884), Free Joe
and Other Georgian Sketches (1887), Balaam and His
Master and Other Sketches and Stories (1891), and
Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Planta-
tion (1905). Mark Twain's questioning of the South's
new order was presented directly in The Gilded Age: A
Tale of Today (1873) and allegorically in A Connecti-
cut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889). George W.
Cable's John March, Southerner (1894) revealed the
danger that the New South movement might foster the
development of a colonial economy whereby the South
would be merely a dependency of the imperial North.
The movement's neglect of black southerners, despite
the pledges of its leaders, was a major theme of The
Colonel's Dream (1905) by Charles W. Chesnutt. In
The Romance of a Plain Man (1909) and Virginia
(1913), Ellen Glasgow attacked the crass materialism
of the new ideology.
The literary opponents of the New South movement
left an important legacy to the writers of the Southern
Renascence that began in the 1920s and to the writers
whose careers began after World War II. Many of the
later writers condemned the region's worship of Mam-
mon, which, they believed, accompanied the rise of the
industrial spirit. Ever since its emergence, the idea of
the New South has primarily elicited opposition from
the region's writers. They have not rejected the hope of
prosperity, but they have found repugnant the possibil-
ity that the South would cease to provide an arcadian
alternative to a grasping, misdirected mass culture.
Wayne Mixon
See also Atlanta Constitution; Atlanta, Georgia; Industrializa-
tion; Textiles.

Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After
Reconstruction (1992); Paul M. Gaston, The New South
Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (1970); Lucinda
MacKethan, The Dream of Arcady (1980); Wayne Mixon,
Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913
(1980); C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-
1913 (1951).
NEWSPAPERS
Southerners in early colonial America read newspapers
imported from Europe or transported south from Bos-
ton. The Boston News Letter appeared in 1704, fol-
lowed by the Boston Gazette in 1719 and the New-
England Courant in 1721. The Courant was the first
newspaper to successfully challenge government au-
thority. It had high literary content because of its liter-
ate editor, James Franklin, and it offered an indepen-
dent voice, at least until 1722 when one of its editorials
against local authorities landed Franklin in jail.
In this somewhat restrictive atmosphere, London
printer and newspaper publisher William Parks arrived
in Annapolis, a town that was the social and commer-
cial center for the region's three thousand inhabitants
and where the wealthiest and most cultured of Mary-
land's residents resided. Although Boston was the most
influential city in the colonies, Annapolis was the most
important community in Maryland and one of the
most important commercial centers in the South. Much
of the wealth of Annapolis had been created through
the region's tobacco farming.
Parks's London newspaper career got started during
the era when Englishman Daniel Defoe was combining
an adventurous life-style with journalism and litera-
ture. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719, and
the book was serialized in colonial newspapers. In Sep-
tember 1727, when Parks began publishing the first is-
sues of the Maryland Gazette from his Annapolis print-
shop, it was not surprising that the newspaper reflected
the high culture of the town. Parks's newspaper circu-
lated in a society that mirrored England. From England
came the practice of using literary essays for moral and
political opinion, of using fables and fairy tales for
warning against vice. With a highly literate editor and
an elite literate readership, the Maryland Gazette be-
came a respected medium for poetry and literary es-
says. It was the perfect newspaper for the plantation
class of Maryland, which had the means and the time
to appreciate literature. When the College of William
and Mary presented to the governor of Virginia the
Newspapers / 547
two poems it was required to produce as rent for its
land, the poems appeared in the Maryland Gazette, the
newspaper closest to Williamsburg, which had no
newspaper of its own. William Parks, with manners
honed in Britain and well connected to Annapolis high
society, fit right in and became one of the town's cham-
pions of cultural growth.
Parks's Maryland Gazette ceased publication in
1735 when he moved to Williamsburg, but the news-
paper was revived ten years later under Jonas Green,
who did even more for literature than Parks had done.
A poet himself and a member of Annapolis clubs and
social circles, Green came to Maryland via Benjamin
Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette (1728). A "Poet's
Corner" appeared in Green's Maryland Gazette, and
under Green, the Gazette covered the theater and pub-
lished theatrical criticism with more depth and breadth
than any newspaper in the colonies. As Baltimore grew
in influence, William Goddard founded the Maryland
Journal in 1773, but it was his mother, Mary Katherine
Goddard, who took control of the newspaper and ran
it for ten years after William ran into management
troubles.
Back in 1736, William Parks had been appointed
Williamsburg postmaster and the Virginia colony's of-
ficial printer. Employing even more of a literary em-
phasis than he had in Maryland, Parks published the
first issue of the Virginia Gazette on August 6, 1736.
From the first issue, Parks emphasized original essays,
publishing many of his own and others' essays under
a column titled "The Monitor." Scholars studying the
period assess the quality of the columns as the best
original writing of any newspaper in the colonies. The
classics, foreign translations, locally written poetry,
and reprinted poetry from England graced the pages of
Parks's Virginia Gazette, which set the literary stan-
dard for the colonial press. For many people in the col-
onies, the newspaper was their primary source of liter-
ature.
South Carolina produced its first newspaper after
the Crown agreed to provide support for an official
printer in Charleston. Operating a book and stationery
shop in addition to tending to his government printing
responsibilities, Eleazar Philips Jr. first issued the South
Carolina Weekly Gazette in 1731. The South Carolina
Gazette appeared in 1773 and contained an excep-
tional amount of material devoted to essays and litera-
ture. Poetry, prologues to plays, and essays ranging
from morality to manners were found within its pages.
Especially popular were reprints of British magazines.
 606 I Old Dominion
western Virginia, which was not established till the
nineteenth century) or in any other section of Virginia
west of the Piedmont-unless it were used in reference
to the connotations described above.
Therefore, given its limited and implied references
to place, time, ethnicity, and class, "Old Dominion"
has understandably become a marker for these ele-
ments. Often used by historians and the authors of his-
torical romances, it is rarely employed in any but re-
spectful, affectionate, and on occasion nostalgic terms.
Marylander John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870)
subtitled his popular romance Swallow Barn (1832) A
Sojourn in the Old Dominion. His contemporary Vir-
ginian John Esten Cooke (1830-1886) gave his The
Virginia Comedians (1854) the subtitle Old Days in
the Old Dominion. Another contemporary Virginian,
William Alexander Caruthers (1802-1846), used it in
the titles of two of his romances-The Cavaliers of Vir-
ginia; or, The Recluse of Jamestown: A Historical Ro-
mance of the Old Dominion (1834) and The Knights
of the Golden Horse-shoe: A Traditionary Tale of the
Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion (1845).
Thomas Nelson Page, an unabashed apologist for the
"Old Dominion" and all that it implies, titled one of
his social histories The Old Dominion: Her Making
and Her Manners (1910). These examples convey a
consistency-a rendering of a gallant age now past, an
idealization of the local history, a celebration of the
aristocratic plantation culture, and an emphasis on ci-
vility. Significantly, later twentieth-century historians,
emphasizing a rapidly changing, contemporary Vir-
ginia, use the term Old Dominion as a point of con-
trast-e.g., Marshall Fishwick (1923- ), Virginia: A
New Look at the Old Dominion (1959); and Virginius
Dabney (1901-1995), Virginia: The New Dominion
(1971).
Welford Dunaway Taylor
See also Aristocracy; New South; Tidewater.
Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., The Cavalier in Virginia Fiction
(1985).
OLD SOUTH
The term Old South typically refers to the period span-
ning the beginning of the nineteenth century to the be-
ginning of the Civil War. In the latter half of the twenti-
eth century, it has also come to signify in a more
general sense the conservative belief systems and social
patterns of the traditional South. In current popular
usage, both meanings may connote a host of positive
mythic conceptions and images of the South's past, in-
cluding the Lost Cause, Moonlight and-Magnolias, the
cavalier, the belle, and even the happy slave; con-
a
versely, they may convey associations with benighted
South of intolerance, racism, and violence.
The mythic image of the Old South came into being
during the so-called '.'New South" period, when local-
color writers Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson
Page, and others found a national audience for their
sentimentalized depictions of slave-master relation-
ships. Capitalizing on the spirit of sectional reconcilia-
-i:ion that swept the nation following the end of Recon-
struction, these writers succeeded in recasting the
antebellum South in a favorable light by stressing the
nobility and benevolence of the southern aristocrat and
the childlik~-dependence -~f the slave on his maste~:- .
In his collection of essays titled The Old South
(1892), Thomas Nelson Page sought to soften resent-
ment toward the South by reminding readers of Virgin-
ia's leadership in the American Revolution and con-
flating that struggle with the South's defense of states'
rights. Asserting that slavery was "forced" on an un-
willing South by a power-hungry British crown and av-
aricious New England slave traders, he describes the
peculiar institution as a "curse" to all but the slaves
and blames the Civil War on the religious fanaticism of
New England abolitionists. For Page, the Old South
was "a civilization so pure, so noble, that. the ·wo-;_:-id
today holds nothing equal to it." Though such hyper-
bole did not differ markedly from the rhetoric of the
proslavery apologia of the antebellum years, Page's
message seems to have met with a better reception in
the North than did those earlier, more polemical de-
fenses of the South, made while slavery was still the
mainstay of the South's economy.
The image of the South that Page and his contempo-
raries promoted in the last years of the nineteenth cen-
tury proved remarkably popular in the first half of the
twentieth century. It bears a strong resemblance to the
Old South depicted in Thomas Dixon's The Clansman
(1905) and its film adaptation, The Birth of a Nation
(1915), to the agrarian South described in I'll Take My
Stand (1930), and to the antebellum plantation South
described in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind
(1936). More recent literary and cinematic treatments
of the antebellum South tend to present a more bal-

anced, if not negative view of social relations in the an-
tebellum years.
James H. Watkins
See also Agrarians; Cavalier; I'll Take My Stand; Lost Cause;
New South.
Thomas Nelson Page, The Old South (1892); Bertram Wyatt-
Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South
(1982).
OLD SOUTHWEST
Historians use the term Old Southwest to describe the
frontier region that was bounded by the Tennessee
River to the north, the Gulf of Mexico to the south, the
Mississippi River to the west, and the Ocmulgee River
to the east. Literary critics, on the other hand, use Old
Southwest more freely. In literary studies, Old South-
west refers to a region not necessarily on the frontier
that usually includes some combination of Virginia,
Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee,
and Georgia, along with some of these states that did
not join the Union until the nineteenth century: Ala-
bama (1819), Mississippi (1817), Louisiana (1812),
Arkansas (1836), and Texas (1845). Old Southwest
Humor describes a genre of sometimes humorous short
fiction that flourished in these states during the antebel-
lum period.
At the close of the eighteenth century, the Old
Southwest proper was dominated by four tribes of Na-
tive Americans: the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the
Creeks, and the Seminoles. These groups came under
increasing pressure from white settlers during the
Great Migration, which followed the War of 1812;
census figures from 1810 and 1820 show that the pop-
ulation of modern-day Mississippi more than doubled
during this decade and the population of modern-day
Alabama increased more than sixteenfold. In 1817, the
United States government established the "principle"
of removing Native Americans to west of the Missis-
sippi River. During the presidency of Andrew Jackson
(1829-1837), their removal proceeded apace.
Geographically, the Old Southwest was dominated
by swamps and pine barrens. The swamplands were
suitable primarily for catching malaria, and the pine
barrens were suitable mostly for grazing cattle. There-
fore, the region's economy was based on herding, not
planting. King Cotton did not begin its rise to power
Old Southwest / 607
until the flush times after Eli Whitney had invented the
cotton gin and until most Native Americans had
crossed the Mississippi. Even in 1860, however, the
southern cotton crop was worth only half as much as
the livestock that grazed the region. Thus the antebel-
lum South and even moreso the Old Southwest were
populated by herders. Because they were herders, these
settlers had a great deal of free time. While their cattle
roamed, these men fought, drank, danced, gambled,
hunted, and courted-all pastimes that were fodder for
Old Southwest humorists.
Although the characters who populate Old South-
west humor are generally lower class and poorly edu-
cated, the genre's authors are the opposite. Although
most were professional men, few were professional
writers. Typically, Old Southwest humorists were ama-
teurs who felt compelled to write by a frontier culture
that seemed to be disappearing almost as quickly as it
had appeared. These writers realized that if they did
not record these scenes of American history, the history
would be lost. Thus many Old Southwest humorists
thought of themselves not as literary artists but as so-
cial historians. As such, these writers are the forerun-
ners of the American literary realists of the later nine-
teenth century. Writers such as Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet and Joseph Glover Baldwin championed a
literary aesthetic that would later find advocates in
Mark Twain and William Dean Howells.
Old Southwest humor has its roots in the region's
oral literature, especially in the stories traded among
lawyers as they rode their circuits. The first published
examples of Old Southwest humor appeared in small
local newspapers scattered throughout the South. In
1807, a Washington, Georgia, newspaper, the Monitor,
published the genre's first important work: an untitled
description of a militia muster. This sketch, which is
commonly known today as "The Militia Company
Drill," was published under a pseudonym, as was the
frequent practice of Old Southwest authors, many of
whom did not want to be associated with a frivolous
and perhaps even disreputable enterprise. The author
of "The Militia Company Drill" was Oliver Hillhouse
Prince, a young lawyer who had recently passed his bar
exam. His sketch was an epistle in which "Timothy
Crabshaw" wrote to "Fugey" of a militia muster that
he had recently witnessed.
Such framework stories are the norm in Old South-
west literature, as genteel authors and narrators strive
to keep a distance from their lower-class subjects. This
tension between the cultivated and the common contri-

Woman (1899). In The Wife of His Youth and Other
Stories of the Color Line (1899), Chesnutt dropped his
Uncle Julius narrator but continued to explore race in
stories such as "The Passing of Grandison," in which
an outwardly passive slave outwits his master and frees
his family. Finally, in her collections Bayou Folk (1894)
and A Night in Acadie (1897), Kate Chopin sketches
realistic portraits of her region of Louisiana while also
exploring race, class, and sex. "Desiree's Baby" is the
story of a woman who faces alienation when she learns
she is part African American. In "Athena'ise: A Story of
Temperament," a young woman defies cultural expec-
tations when she temporarily leaves her husband to
taste independence. By emphasizing both place and
people, these realists showed southern short fiction
moving from local color toward the more sophisticated
work of the next century.
Mark Canada
See also Local Color; Plantation Fiction; Southwestern Humor.
Henry Seidel Canby, A Study of the Short Story (1913); Eugene
Current-Garcia, The American Short Story Before 1850
(1985); Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American
Short Story (1923).
SHORT STORY, 1900 TO WORLD WAR II
For various historical and cultural reasons, the south-
ern short story in the first half of the twentieth century
often focused on certain themes, such as the persistence
of the past, the viciousness of race prejudice, and the
importance of ritual, that are, if not particular to the
South, at least common to that region's literature.
The human relationship to the natural world, the
primitive importance of ritual, and the conquest of
time are common themes in the stories of Caroline
Gordon and William Faulkner. Gordon (1895-1981)
was born in Todd County, Kentucky. Her best-known
stories, "Old Red" and "The Last Day in the Field,"
published in The Forest of the South (1945), focus on
Aleck Maury, an academic scholar of the old school
who hunts and fishes as a ritualistic means of remain-
ing one with the natural world. In "Old Red," a story
that has been extravagantly praised, Maury identifies
with a fox, for he knows that both he and the animal
play a noble game and that both are pursued by the in-
evitability of time and death. In "The Last Day in the
Field," on an elegiac fall day particularly good for the
Short Story, 1900 to World War II / 787
hunt, Maury, in spite of a bad leg, goes out on the hunt,
reaffirming his knowledge that hunting requires pa-
tience, trust, and respect.
In their creation of the mythical world of Yoknapa-
tawpha, the stories of William Faulkner (1897-1962)
seem written to be integrated rather than to stand
alone. Thus a number of them become parts of his nov-
els. "Spotted Horses" went into The Hamlet (1940),
"An Odor of Verbena" concluded The Unvanquished
(1938), and "Dilsey" concluded The Sound and the
Fury (1929). Two of Faulkner's best-known stories,
"That Evening Sun" and "Barn Burning," feature cen-
tral characters who are important in the The Sound
and the Fury and The Hamlet. His collections include
These Thirteen (1931), Dr. Martino and Other Stories
(1934), and his best-known, Go Down, Moses and
Other Stories (1942), in which shorter pieces such as
"Was" and "Delta Autumn" create a fabled back-
ground for the central story of Ike McCaslin's great
hunt in "The Bear."
Faulkner's most famous story, "A Rose for Emily,"
stands alone as a kind of venerated monument, for al-
though minor characters in the story appear in Faulkner
novels, Emily is an isolated icon of the South, holding
on to the past even as it decays around her. In addition
to the power of the gothic conclusion of the story,
the basic reason "Emily" is such a favorite Faulkner
piece is that it so dearly embodies his favorite theme-
the persistence of the past-and his favorite tech-
nique-the disruption of time as a linear series of
events.
Racial conflict, a common theme for many southern
writers, is, because of its broad social implications,
usually more suitably treated in the novel. The short
fiction of Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987), born in Co-
weta County, Georgia, better known for his novels To-
bacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), fre-
quently focuses on the viciousness of race prejudice as
part of everyday life in the rural South. "Kneel to the
Rising Sun," from his 1935 collection of the same
name and one of his most highly praised stories, fea-
tures an ignorant landowner, a spineless white share-
cropper, and a proud African American. When the
sharecropper's father falls in the hog pen while looking
for food and is partially eaten, only the African Ameri-
can has the courage to stand up to the landowner. Be-
cause the sharecropper cannot turn against a white
man, no matter how vicious he is, he betrays his Afri-
can American friend, who is shot so many times his
 788 / Short Story, 1900 to World War II
body jumps around "like a sackful of kittens being
killed with an automatic shotgun."
Richard Wright (1908-1960), the best-known
southern African American writer during this period,
also focused on the violence of racial prejudice, but
often with a polemical intention. Born in Adams
County, Mississippi, to an illiterate sharecropper father
and a schoolteacher mother, his first published story,
"Bright and Morning Star," was chosen for Best Amer-
ican Stories in 1939. It is a simple narrative about an
African American mother who, when her two sons join
the Communist Party, gives up her Christian religion
for a new vision of suffering black men who have taken
the place of "Him nailed to the Cross." When she mis-
takenly betrays her sons' comrades, her decision to sac-
rifice herself to correct her error is "the star that grew
bright in the morning of new hope" and makes her feel
that the whole meaning of her life is poised on the
"brink of a total act."
"Big Boy Leaves Home" is largely a dialogue story
of four African American boys whose simple act of
going swimming turns into tragedy when a white
woman sees the naked boys and her companion shoots
two of them, after which Big Boy struggles with him
and kills him. The rest of the story is the inevitable tale
of racial viciousness. Although white men catch one of
the boys, pour hot tar on him, and set him afire, Big
Boy escapes. In Wright's most anthologized story,
"The Man Who Was Almos' a Man," the escape of
young Dave, an African American who buys a gun to
feel like a man and then accidentally shoots a mule, is
more ambiguous. After being made fun of by other Af-
rican American men and told by his father that he must
pay for the mule out of his meager earnings, he boards
a freight train to escape to somewhere he can be a man;
ominously, however, the gun is still in his pocket.
The basic difference between Wright's stories and
those of Zora Neale Hurston is that Hurston, without
obvious social intentions, bases her stories on the cul-
tural life of the people. Hurston (1891-1960) grew up
in Eatonville, Florida, the oldest incorporated African
American town in the United States. Her best-known
stories are "The Gilded Six-Bits," "Sweat," and
"Drenched in Light." In the former, a young African
American couple are loving, playful, and happy, until
the wife goes to bed with another African American
man to get the gold piece he offers. The husband dis-
covers the couple in fragrante delecto, but he eventu-
ally forgives Bessie May and takes the coin (which is
but a gilded half dollar) to town and buys her candy
kisses. "Drenched in Light" is a simple story of an Afri-
can American child who wears her Grandma's new ta-
blecloth to a carnival, even though she knows she will
be punished. On the way home, she is picked up by a
white couple, who give the grandmother five dollars to
compensate for the ruined tablecloth. When the child
snuggles up to the white woman and says she is going
to sing a song for her, the woman looks hungrily at her
and says, "I would like just a little of her sunshine to
soak into my soul."
Because the short story is such a highly conven-
tional and tightly structured genre, novelists usually
succeed with the form only when they self-consciously
experiment with its lyrical style or its tradition of de-
picting a dreamlike reality. Thomas Wolfe (1900-
1938), born in Asheville, North Carolina, is often cited
as the archetypal author of big formless novels written
in a rambling autobiographical style; but he also pub-
lished forty stories in a variety of slick and quality jour-
nals, many of which are reprinted in From Death to
Morning (1935) and The Hills Beyond (1941).
"The Lost Boy," a lyrical story about memory and
the tenuous nature of one's status in the world, is a
highly controlled, four-part evocation of Grover, age
eleven, the brother of Eugene Gant, the central charac-
ter in Look Homeward, Angel. Part I is a third-person
narrative about his being accused of dishonesty by a
crabby candy-store owner and his wife, an experience
that makes him feel the guilt all good men have always
felt; in Part IV, Eugene makes a pilgrimage to the house
where his brother died at age twelve, knowing that he
will never return again and that, as a result, the lost
boy is gone forever. In "Only the Dead Know Brook-
lyn," an undiscerning Brooklynite relates a dialogue he
has had with a man looking for Bensonhurst because
he likes the name., The narrator says the man will never
get to know Brooklyn by depending on a map, for he
has lived there all his life and doesn't know it. The
story is a cryptic allegory about the difference between
aesthetic and practical knowledge.
Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Ellen Glasgow, also
better known for their novels, succeeded with the short
story when they made use of one of its most traditional
gothic conventions-the haunted house. Born in Perry-
ville, Kentucky, Roberts (1881-1941) published two
collections of short stories, The Haunted Mirror
(1932) and Not By Strange Gods (1941). Her most fa-
mous story, "The Haunted Palace," whose title is de-
rived from the poem in Poe's "Fall of the House of
Usher," focuses on a house that sharecropper Hubert

and his wife Jess plan to buy-a house so possessed by
all those who have lived in it that it becomes an halluci-
natory object. When the practical-minded couple allow
their sheep to give birth to lambs in the rooms of the
house, a shrouded figure representative of its past chal-
lenges them; the story ends in the triumph of prosaic
everyday reality over the romance of the old nobility.
Ellen Glasgow (1874-1945), born in Richmond,
Virginia, said in an interview in 1916 that short stories
bored her and that she saw everything in the form of a
novel. Nevertheless, her collection The Shadowy Third
and Other Stories (1925) contains one story, "Dare's
Gift," that is practically a prototype of the nineteenth-
century American short story. Beginning in typical Poe
fashion with the narrator, a practical and logical cor-
poration lawyer, wondering if the event he is about to
narrate really occurred, the story features a delicate
southern wife suffering from a nervous breakdown,
which necessitates the narrator's taking her to Dare's
Gift, "the dream of a house," stepping into which is
like stepping into another world. A wise old doctor,
who says the incomprehensible has always seemed to
him the supreme fact of life, suggests that the house's
haunted state is the result of being "saturated with a
thought, haunted by treachery." He tells the story of
Lucy Dare, who, on moving into the house, becomes so
intoxicated by the idea of the Confederacy that when
her former fiance seeks shelter there, she surrenders
him up and he is shot. The doctor's conclusion-that
Lucy had "drained the whole of experience in an in-
stant" and that it is the high moments that make a life
and the flat ones that fill the years-is a classic descrip-
tion of the typical short-story theme in American litera-
ture.
Because of its isolated nature, stories about the Ap-
palachian region of the South are most likely to be
characterized as local-color. Jesse Stuart (1906-1984),
from Greenup County, Kentucky, who writes simple
narratives about rural Appalachian life that move pre-
dictably toward comic/ironic resolutions, is the best
known. Stuart's volumes of short stories include Head
o' W-Hollow (1936) and Men of the Mountains
(1941). A typical story is "The Split Cherry Tree,"
about a father who goes to his son's school to shoot the
teacher for taking students on field trips instead of
keeping them in school for real "learnin'," a threat that
the tone of the story never allows the reader to take se-
riously. The teacher wins the father over by showing
him germs in the scum on his teeth through a micro-
scope.
Short Story, 1900 to World War II / 789
Although not as well known as Stuart, James Still
(1906- } is a much more perceptive observer of Ken-
tucky mountain life and a much better writer. Many of
his stories, which appeared throughout the 1930s and
1940s in periodicals, are reprinted in his novel River of
Earth (1940) and his collection On Troublesome Creek
(1941). One of his best-known stories, "The Moving,"
is a poignant evocation of a family forced to move
when the mines close. The last image the young narra-
tor has is of Hig Sommers, a witty boy destined to live
forever as a child, holding his breeches up, his other
arm in the air, ironically saying goodbye by crying
"Hello, hello!" The story is a delicate combination of
poignancy, pride, and comic reserve told with carefully
controlled Chekhovian simplicity. Poor but not the
subjects of sociological analysis, Still's characters are
embodiments of endurance, pride, and dignity.
The two greatest masters of the short story in the
South between the turn of the century and World War
II are Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. In her
first two collections, A Curtain of Green (1941) and
The Wide Net (1943), Welty focuses brilliantly on the
Mississippi milieu she knows so well, creating enig-
matic characters and symbolic situations that combine
the ordinary and the mythically meaningful. It is not
simply social isolation that plagues Welty's characters,
but rather a primal sense of separateness; and it is not
mere social validation that they hunger for, but rather
a genuine healing love that will give them a sense of
order and meaning. Memorable characters in Welty's
stories caught in a quest for their own identity include
in "Petrified Man" Leota and Mrs. Fletcher, who, Me-
dusa-like, metaphorically turn men into stone; Phoenix
Jackson, the indefatigable grandmother who in "A
Worn Path" goes on a heroic journey to seek relief for
her suffering grandson; Livie, in the story that bears
her name, who dares to leave the control and order of
the patriarchal Solomon for the vitality of Cash Mc-
Cord; and Sister in "Why I Live at the P.O," who tries
to validate herself to her family when they welcome
home her prodigal sister.
Welty's stories focus less on characters defined by
their stereotypical social roles than by their archetypal
metaphysical being. In the story "Clytie," although it
is true that Clytie is a stereotyped old maid, exploited
by her family and laughed at by the townspeople for
her eccentricity, it is not social criticism that Welty fo-
cuses on here but a search for primal identity; when
Clytie looks down into the mirrored surface of the rain
barrel and sees her own face recoil from her, she can
 790 I Short Story, 1900 to World War II
think of nothing else to do but thrust her head into the
"kind, featureless depth" of the water and hold it
there. Welty's stories seem to spring more from the
world of myth and story than from the real world, and
the language in which they are written is often highly
symbolic and allusive.
Katherine Anne Porter is better known for her short
stories than for her single novel. Flowering Judas and
Other Stories (1940) contains most of her best-known
stories, such as "Theft," "The Jilting of Granny
Weatherall," "Flowering Judas," and "Maria Concep-
cion"; and her second collection, The Leaning Tower
and Other Stories (1944), contains the Miranda sto-
ries, "The Witness," "The Old Order," "The Circus,"
and "The Grave." Porter's most common theme is the
conflict between chaos and order, between letting go
and holding back. The theme can best be seen in two
stories in which the child Miranda faces the horrors of
birth and death/flesh and decay-"Circus" and "The
Grave"-and two stories in which women try to main-
tain control in the face of loss of self, "Flowering
Judas" and "Theft."
As many critics have pointed out, "The Grave" is
closer to a lyric poem than to traditional narrative, for
the compression of its language transforms it into met-
aphor. The story focuses on Miranda's reaction to a
gold ring-which makes her long to put aside her tom-
boyish childhood for her most feminine dress-and to
the opened body of the pregnant rabbit-which intro-
duces her to the mysterious nature of birth and death;
it is a quintessential transformation of memory into
meaning. "Theft" also focuses on memory, albeit the
"immediate past," as a young woman recalls the seem-
ingly irrelevant events of the day. What connects the
seemingly unrelated memories is that all of them focus
on broken, flawed, or faulty relationships in which
people are posturing or putting on false fronts. Written
in Porter's typically economical manner, the story sug-
gests lives lived carelessly, without commitment and
honesty.
By means of a tactic that has dominated modern
short fiction since Anton Chekhov, Porter makes such
stories as her most famous one, "Flowering Judas," ap-
pear to be realistic situations about people caught in
specific moral dilemmas, while at the same time they
are spiritual allegories in which characters and objects
are emblems of universal moral issues. The many di-
chotomies in the story-Laura's Catholicism and her
socialism, her sensuality and her ascetic renunciation,
her dedication to the people and her renunciation of
genuine involvement-coalesce in the symbolic dichot-
omy of Braggioni, who affirms life even though it
means throwing himself into the physical and becom-
ing a "professional lover of humanity," and Eugenio,
the imprisoned revolutionary who maintains his ideal-
ism but who negates life and wants to die because he is
bored.
Although the southern short story is more likely to
be identified with place than stories from other regions,
the most influential southern short-story writers in the
first half of the twentieth century-Faulkner, Welty,
and Porter-transcend local color, exotic locales, and
marginalized characters to create universal stories of
the human condition.
Charles E. May
See also Appalachian Literature; Faulkner, William; Local
Color; Short-Story Cycles; Welty, Eudora; Yoknapatawpha.
Philip Stevick, ed., The American Short Story: 1900-1945
(1984); Arthur Voss, The American Short Story: A Critical Sur-
vey (1973); Ray B. West, The Short Story in America: 1900-
1950 (1952); Austin Wright, The American Short Story in the
Twenties (1961).
SHORT STORY, WORLD WAR II TO PRESENT
When one looks at the short story since World War II,
the first writers to consider are those who wrote fiction
both before and after the war, and who, though de-
ceased, have reputations that continue to endure. Of
these, the foremost is Nobel Prize-winning author,
Mississippian William Faulkner (1897-1962). Faulk-
ner's works were not in great demand until after the
publication in 1949 of The Portable Faulkner. A year
later, forty-two stories published in magazines since
1930, which Faulkner had selected and organized,
were published in his Collected Stories. Many of these
stories were situated in his own mythical world, Yok-
napatawpha County, and some were so interrelated
that they would eventually be parts of larger works.
The Hamlet (1940), for example, contains six stories
either published or about to be published; Go Down,
Moses (1942), a work Faulkner once called a "novel,"
is composed of seven distinct stories. In 1979, after the
Collected Stories had been reprinted twenty-two times,
the Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner made
available in one volume forty-five additional stories. Of
these, twenty, after separate publication in magazine

SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER
"Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the
Fine Arts," as its subheading announced, the Rich-
mond-based Southern Literary Messenger (1834-
1864) was the antebellum South's most important and
influential literary magazine. Published monthly, the
Messenger was founded by Thomas Willis White, a
Virginian who desired, as he put it in the June 1834 in-
augural issue, to send forth a southern literary maga-
zine "as a kind of pioneer, to spy out the land of liter-
ary promise, and to report whether the same be fruitful
or barren." A printer by trade, White had little literary
background, and he was assisted early on by James
Ewell Heath, a Virginia novelist, and Edward Vernon
Sparhawk, a New England-born poet and journalist,
both of whom served short terms as editor during the
magazine's infancy.
The Messenger might have declined quickly but for
the arrival in 1835 of Edgar Allan Poe, who came rec-
ommended to White by John Pendleton Kennedy, the
author of Swallow Barn and an early admirer of Poe's
talent. From the beginning, however, Poe's relationship
with his new employer was strained. Although he ad-
mired the younger man's learning and intelligence,
White resented the Messenger's close association with
Poe in the public mind, and he refused to allow Poe
final say over publication decisions. Poe's drinking
habits also had something to do with the tension that
arose between him and the straitlaced publisher. For
his part, Poe must have a resented a man whose literary
judgment he did not respect, and he left the Messenger
in 1837 to pursue his literary career in the North. Nev-
ertheless, in his brief tenure Poe had helped to bring the
magazine into national prominence. Although he pub-
lished both his poetry and his fiction (including "Bere-
nice" and two segments of Arthur Gordon Pym) in the
Messenger, it was his book reviews that attracted the
most attention. Although many of these were generous
to a fault, more than a few were downright vitriolic in
an age accustomed to uncritical praise for anything
American in origin. In particular, a vicious dissection
of Norman Leslie, authored by the prominent New
York writer Theodore S. Fay, produced a sensation.
Poe could also be caustic with southern authors, as his
1835 review of William Gilmore Simms's The Partisan
amply evidenced.
Following Poe's departure, the bulk of the editorial
work was performed by White and his assistant, Mat-
thew F. Maury. After White suffered a paralytic stroke
Southern Literary Messenger I 827
in 1842, Maury took over the day-to-day operations of
the magazine until it was sold the following year to
Benjamin Blake Minor, an attorney who had been un-
officially associated with the Messenger for some time.
During these years, the Messenger's literary quality de-
clined. From the magazine's inception, White had been
able to attract a number of the most popular magazine
writers of the time, including Nathaniel Parker Willis,
Richard Henry Wilde, and Lydia Sigourney. But with
the exception of Poe's book reviews and a few distin-
guished contributions by Poe, Simms, and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, the Messenger largely failed to
distinguish itself from its northern competition. Senti-
mental fiction and verse, travelogues, and tepid book
reviews dominated the magazine's pages. On the non-
fiction front, however, the Messenger's public ad-
dresses, political essays, and historical pieces tended to
be, especially under Minor's editorship, more distinc-
tive-and more distinctively southern. Maury had
written a number of influential proposals for naval re-
form (many of which were eventually realized), and
Minor continued to publish on military themes. He
also published John Smith's True Relation and a long
series on Virginia history written by Charles Campbell.
Where White himself had called for "a gradual aboli-
tion, or amelioration" of slavery in the January 1835
issue, defenses of slavery, attacks on the abolition
movement, and endorsements of states'-rights theory
by such notable figures as Abel P. Upshur, Thomas
Roderick Dew, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker began
to appear more frequently in the 1840s as sectional
hostilities increased.
In 1845 Minor bought from Simms and incorpo-
rated into the Messenger the Charleston-based South-
ern and Western Monthly Magazine; for a short time,
the magazine bore the unwieldy title of Southern and
Western Literary Messenger and Review. Two years
later, Minor left the Messenger to take a position as the
head of the Virginia Female Institute. The new pub-
lisher and editor was John Reuben Thompson, who
would remain with the Messenger for thirteen years.
An attorney educated at the University of Virginia,
Thompson had a more sophisticated literary taste than
Minor, and he added to Messenger's list of prominent
southern authors the names of Henry Timrod, James
Mathewes Legare, Paul Hamilton Hayne, John Esten
Cooke (whose older brother, Philip Pendleton Cooke,
was already a regular contributor), and Joseph Glover
Baldwin, who contributed several of the sketches that
would later be published as Flush Times in Alabama
 828 / Southern Literary Messenger
and Mississippi (1853). Simms and Poe were frequent
contributors during Thompson's tenure as editor. The
literary content of the Messenger was, however, by no
means exclusively southern; Thompson continued to
publish northern writers and maintained close ties with
New York-based men of letters including Rufus Gris-
wold, Richard Henry Stoddard, and Thomas Bailey
Aldrich.
Despite the high literary quality of the magazine
under his editorship, Thompson confronted the same
problems faced by every other editor of a southern lit-
erary magazine, including his predecessors at the Mes-
senger. When not downright apathetic, southern read-
ers were notoriously delinquent in paying their
subscriptions. Thompson was forced to use his own
funds-over $5,000, he claimed in 1850-to keep the
Messenger afloat, and in 1853 he was forced to sell the
magazine to its printers, Macfarlane and Fergusson, al-
though he remained as paid editor until 1860. Finan-
cial conditions did not improve, and an exasperated
Thompson advertised an 1858 price reduction from $5
to $3 with the hopeful prediction that "the Southern
people will surely not withhold their encouragement"
from the magazine "alone among the monthly periodi-
cals of America, in defence of the Peculiar Institutions
of the Southern Country." Defenses of slavery in-
creased in number and vehemence as the decade pro-
gressed. An unsigned nine-page review in the October
1852 issue excoriated the author of Uncle Tom's
Cabin, concluding with the biblical injunction "Thou
shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," and
as the Civil War approached, virtually every issue of
the Messenger contained a polemic against abolitionist
radicalism.
In 1860, Thompson resigned to take a position as
editor of Southern Field and Fireside. He was replaced
by George W. Bagby, a Virginia physician whose "Let-
ter of Mozis Addums to Billy Ivins," a farcical dialect
tale of a country rube visiting Washington, D.C., had
appeared in the Messenger in 1857. An ardent seces-
sionist, Bagby severed the magazine's remaining tiei
with the northern literary establishment and called, in
the June 1860 issue, for "home-made, purely Southern
articles-tales, stories, sketches, poems, that smack of
the soil." After war broke out, the Messenger docu-
mented military campaigns, attacked northern
"crimes," and criticized Confederate political leaders,
especially Jefferson Davis. In February 1864, Frank H.
Alfriend, who, along with a fellow investor, had
bought the Messenger in December of the preceding
year, assumed the position of editor. Wartime condi-
tions, however, made the continued publication of the
Messenger impossible, and the last issue appeared in
June 1864.
Scott Romine
See also Periodicals, 1800 to 1860; Periodicals, 1860 to 1900;
Poe, Edgar Allan.
Edward E. Chielens, ed., American Literary Magazines (1986);
Benjamin Blake Minor, The Southern Literary Messenger
(1905); Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines,
1741-1850 (1930); Sam G. Riley, Magazines of the American
South (1986); Edwin Reinhold Rogers, Four Southern Maga-
zines (1902).
SOUTHERN LITERATURE, IDEA OF
The idea of southern literature is a highly political con-
cept structured upon the tensions between regionalism
and nationalism. Through the years, this tension char-
acterizing the relationship of a southern literary iden-
tity to an American literary identity has both propelled
the development of southern literature and served as
the crux of efforts to define southern literature. Further
negotiating the mutable concept of regionalism, each
generation has endeavored to establish criteria for
what constitutes southern literature. The results have
ranged from strictly geographical guidelines for the
birthplaces of authors to a list of qualities sought in the
literature itself. The idea of southern literature has de-
veloped from an elite white man's literature to an in-
clusive multicultural literature reflecting differences in
race, gender, and class. Over time, it has continuously
evolved to meet political and cultural needs for mem-
ory and identity. In the years ahead, the idea of south-
ern literature faces the challenge of defining itself in a
nation growing more homogenized and a world grow-
.ing ever more globally connected.
The idea of southern literature entered the cultural
discourse in the 1830s. Along with the general Ameri-
can self-consciousness about creating a national litera-
ture came a heightened sense of regionalism. One in-
fluential school of thought envisioned a national
literature reflecting the distinctiveness of each of the
country's regions. Many southern thinkers endorsed
this concept and called for a southern literature that
faithfully reflected the South in tradition and subject
matter, and thus that would make a distinctive contri-

bution to the fabric of the national literature. State-
ments of the time were often characterized by a dual
purpose: urging current and future regional writers to
produce a southern literature, while also lamenting or
attempting to justify a southern literary record they
saw as poor in such accomplishments. From the 1830s
to 1860, the exhortations for a southern literature
evolved from a proud regionalism trying to assert itself
against the northern literary dominance to strident sec-
tionalism as the issues of slavery and states' rights
.shaped the literary productions of the 1850s. With the
Civil War and the rise of Confederate nationalis~] for
·a brief time southern literature became its own na-
tional literature.
The literary magazine culture trying to establish it-
self in the South during the antebellum period provided
the major channel for voices lobbying for a southern
literature. Among publication ventures, many of them
short-lived, were Southern Literary Messenger, The
Magnolia, Southern Review, Russell's Magazine, De
Bow's Review, and the Southern Quarterly Review.
Noteworthy articles in these magazines that called at-
tention to the possibilities of southern literature in-
clude James E. Heath's "Southern Literature" in the
Southern Literary Messenger (August 1834), William
Gilmore Simms's letter printed in The Magnolia (Janu-
ary 1841), Daniel Whitaker's "The Newspaper and the
Periodical Press" in Southern Quarterly Review (Janu-
ary 1842), and Simms's "Literary Prospects of the
South" in Russell's Magazine (June 1858), a critique of
the climate for writers in the South. Throughout his ca-
reer, Simms championed the idea of a southern litera-
ture and encouraged its production through his editor-
ship of literary magazines and his own writing, which
found its subject matter in the South's history. In his
"Literature of the South" in Russell's Magazine (Au-
gust 1859), Henry Timrod, another vocal supporter of
a southern literature, criticized the notion of "South-
ernism" in literature, or the idea that southern writers
had to focus only on regional topics, and instead cham-
pioned the development of a higher critical culture in
the South that would truthfully evaluate southern liter-
ature, eschewing a partiality based on southern author-
ship. Only then, he contended, would the South pro-
duce truly good literature. The crisis of the Civil War
suspended efforts such as Simms's and Timrod's as sec-
tionalist literary sentiment became Confederate loy-
alty.
In the years immediately following the Civil War,
the idea of southern literature was nearly synonymous
Southern Literature, Idea of / 829
/ with war poetry and war recollections. Southerners
saw the Confederate poetry published in newspapers
and small collections as representative of their culture's
collective despair and loss. Among the early collections
usually characterized by rabid sectionalism, Simms
alone reissued the call for a national literature com-
prised of distinctive regional literature in his War
Poetry of the South (1866). Later, post-Reconstruction
voices adopted his insistence upon the coexistence of
sectionalism and nationalism, adjusting it to fit their
own agendas. Other texts published during the decade
of the Civil War with perspectives that encouraged the
idea of a southern literature were Mary Forrest (Mrs.
Julia Freeman)'s Women of the South Distinguished in
Literature (1860), James Wood Davidson's The Living
Writers of the South (1869), and Mrs. Mary T. Tardy
("Ida Raymond")'s Southland Writers: Biographical
and Critical Sketches of the Living Female Writers of
the South. With Extracts from Their Writings (1870).
Their gestures of identifying and grouping writers
boosted the concept of a southern literary identity.
In the decades following Reconstruction, the idea of
a southern literature accrued authority. The concept
gained credence with the national success of the south-
ern local-color writers in the 1880s and 1890s. Though
only in a narrow genre, at least southern writers' works
were appearing in northern literary magazines and
were recognized by the northern literary culture as con-
tributing to the national literature. The calls for a
southern literature were highly political and reflected
varying motives. While most southerners by the 1880s
adopted the rhetoric that to be regional is to be na-
tional, a rationale that fit for local-color fiction, the
rhetoric meant different things to different promoters.
For the most rabid sectionalists, the rhetoric simply
provided an acceptable cloak for partisanship; for the
most progressive voices, the rhetoric was a genuine ef-
fort to facilitate the reintegration of the South into the
nation while ensuring the continuance of a valued re-
gional identity. One vocal faction endorsed the idea of
southern literature as an essential tool in preserving
and memorializing a heritage that they felt was threat-
ened as the South rejoined the nation. The rabid sec-
tionalism of these perpetuators of Confederate mem-
ory supported highly sentimentalized views that
glorified the Old South. Another impetus within south-
ern culture for encouraging the idea of a southern liter-
ature was to challenge the North's long-running literary
dominance. The majority of anthologies, textbooks,
and literary criticism produced in the North dismissed
 830 I Southern Literature, Idea of
southern literature and other aspects of southern cul-
ture. In reaction, southern editors produced their own
anthologies and textbooks of southern literature, espe-
cially from the 1890s to 1915, an important phenome-
non in giving credibility and permanence to southern
literature. The prefaces and introductions of these an-
thologies, which reflect varying political and cultural
viewpoints, were influential in shaping readers' con-
cepts of southern literature. Examples of these perspec-
tives include Louise Manly's Southern Literature from
1579-1895 (1895) and Mildred Lewis Rutherford's
The South in History and Literature: A Hand-book of
Southern Authors (1906).
Promoters of the New South displayed yet another
motive for touting the idea of southern literature. This
group, comprised primarily of southern university aca-
demics, endeavored to create a southern literary iden-
tity and canon that would present a more modern and
appealing view of the South to northerners by empha-
sizing contemporary writers and editing the literary
history of the Old South and the Confederacy. While
controlling the image of the South that the canon con-
veyed, they also encouraged the development of a
higher criticism in southern literary studies as Timrod
had years earlier before the Civil War began. They
worked to bring the same critical standards to bear on
southern literature as northern scholars did on Ameri-
can literature in general; they believed that only
through such rigor would southern literature be ac-
cepted on a par with the literature of other regions.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the
widespread efforts of a network of southern academics
had institutionalized the study of southern literature.
Reflective of the Jim Crow era, southern literature as
they defined it continued to mean white literature.
Through the anthologies and textbooks that they pub-
lished, the articles they wrote, the speeches they gave,
and the courses they taught, this founding generation
of southern literary scholars had a seminal impact on
the idea of southern literature. Among the academics
whose networked efforts helped to legitimize the field
of southern literature were William Malone Baskervill,
Edwin A. Alderman, Charles W. Kent, John Bell Hen-
nemann, Carl Holliday, Edwin Mims, Bruce R. Payne,
Leonidas Warren Payne Jr., C. Alphonso Smith, Henry
Snyder, and W. P. Trent. The major universities in-
volved were the University of the South at Sewanee,
Trinity College (later Duke University), Vanderbilt
University, the University of Virginia, and the Univer-
sity of North Carolina (later the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill). Representative essays of the
time supporting and defining southern literature in-
clude C. Alphonso Smith's "The Possibilities of the
South in Literature" (Sewanee Review, 1898), Charles
W. Kent's The Revival of Interest in Southern Letters
and a Plea for the Preservation of the Southland
(1902), Henry N. Snyder's "The Reconstruction of
Southern Literary Thought" (South Atlantic Quar-
terly, 1902), Edwin A. Alderman's introduction to The
Library of Southern Literature (1907), Charles W.
Kent's essay "Southern Literature" (The Library of
Southern Literature, 1907), Carl Holliday's preface to
A History of Southern Literature (1906), and Mon-
trose Moses's foreword to The Literature of the South
(1910). By bringing the idea of a southern literature
into the academy, this generation gave it a status
backed by ongoing institutions and legislated that
southern literature be subjected to the same critical
standards as the rest of American literature. Calls for a
critical perspective include John Bell Hennemann's
"The National Element in Southern Literature" in Se-
wanee Review (1903) and Henry N. Snyder's "The
Matter of Southern Literature," also in Sewanee Re-
view (1907). W. P. Trent's anthology Southern Writers:
Selections in Prose and Verse (1905) exhibits the kind
of objectivity in tone that he and others espoused.
The founding of two journals to facilitate dialogue
about southern literature and issues was crucial to the
vitality of efforts to sustain the idea of southern litera-
ture and illustrated the group's commitment to an in-
tellectual approach to the topic. W. P. Trent founded
the Sewanee Review at the University of the South in
1892 and was succeeded in his editorship by John Bell
Hennemann. John Bassett began the South Atlantic
Quarterly at Trinity College (Duke University) in 1902
as a forum for discussion of progressive southern ideas.
In the decades following World War I, influential
scholars and critics continued to mold the idea of
southern literature to reflect cultural agendas of their
era. The ever-evolving idea has been the result of their
efforts to define southern literature, to develop and
apply critical and theoretical perspectives, and to both
form and question a canon. A generalized overview of
the last seventy-five years of the twentieth century re-
veals efforts to build a southern literary narrative of
consensus complicitous with the dominant modernist
ideology of southern white academics, followed by
postmodern challenges to that ideology and a growing
dissensus fueled in part by an insistence upon multiple
race, gender, and class narratives.

The turn-of-the-century network of academics who
had institutionalized the study of southern literature
gave way to the modern generation, which included the
Agrarians and founders of the New Criticism. Instead
of the cultural progressivism and goal of reintegrating
the South into the nation that the earlier academics dis-
played, the Agrarians and their sympathizers exhibited
a cultural conservatism embodied in a regionalism that
privileged the agrarian values of the Old South and saw
the nation as a symbol of the commercialism and in-
dustrialization they opposed. And like southern elites
before them, they endeavored to seize the cultural
power to define the South on their terms. Also during
this second quarter of the century, the Southern Liter-
ary Renascence unfolded, producing writing that gave
southern literature preeminence on the national liter-
ary scene and thus setting the stage for a major re-
vamping of the definition of southern literature. Under
these influences, scholars worked to construct an offi-
cial narrative of continuity in southern literary history
that reflected agrarian values and culminated in the
writing of the Renascence, making those works the
keystone of the southern literary canon. Critically,
some scholars began to move away from the tradi-
tional historical criticism of the former generation and
to experiment with the New Criticism, an apparatus ef-
fective for muting aspects of southern history problem-
atic to their narrative of consensus, specifically race,
gender, and class issues. Their modernist, symbolist vi-
sion valued writers such as William Faulkner, Eudora
Welty, Thomas Wolfe, and Robert Penn Warren,
whose works they saw as transcending the topical.
At midcentury, many important texts were contrib-
uting to a monolithic idea of southern literature.
Rather than emphasizing geographical parameters,
most of the efforts attempted to describe qualities sup-
posedly inherent in the southern temper and thus in
southern literature. Allen Tate's influential thoughts
are expressed in essays such as "The Profession of Let-
ters in the South" (1935) and "A Southern Mode of the
IIQ:;iginationP (1959). "The Profession of Letters in the
South" contains a list of characteristics of southern life
that was often appropriated for a list of topics usually
found in southern writing: manners, memory, a code of
honor, the importance of family, an agrarian society,
and political defense of religious principles. Louis D.
Rubin Jr. and Robert D. Jacobs's collection of essays
Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern
South (1953) was a pivotal work for its insistence on
the centrality of the Southern Renascence and for
Southern Literature, Idea of / 831
opening the field to further study. The lead article in
Southern Renascence is Robert Heilman's essay "The
Southern Temper," which discusses traits he sees as
characteristic of modern southern writings: "a sense of
the concrete, a sense of the elemental, a sense of the
representative, and a sense of totality."
The 1952 anthology The Literature of the South
(rev. 1968), edited by Thomas Daniel Young, Floyd C.
Watkins, and Richmond Croom Beatty, is infused with
Agrarian ideas, emphasizes a continuity of southern
letters, dedicates almost half of its pages to literature
of the Renascence, and contains two African American
writers. Its racially conservative stance is reflective of
the decade dealing with the 1954 Brown v. Board of
Education case. Randall Stewart's foreword to the
work asserts the South's leadership in national litera-
ture and defines a southern writer as one who grew up
in the South, is aware of his southern ties and finds
them inescapable, exhibits southern prejudices, and
continues to draw upon the South as a creative re-
source even if the writer leaves the South. Stewart also
identifies several southern literary traditions: courtly,
sophisticated, "tidewater"; classic; romantic; patriotic;
and humanistic.
On the other hand, Jay B. Hubbell's impressively re-
searched and scholarly literary history The South in
American Literature (1954) works outside of the con-
sensus privileging regionalism, as did his teacher W. P.
Trent before him. Writing as a scholar of American lit-
erature in an era of post-World War II nationalism,
Hubbell's political agenda is to "integrate the literature
of the Southern states with that of the rest of the na-
tion." He does not insist upon consensus in his literary
narrative, but rather touches at least briefly upon the
issue of race, asserts that a "Solid South" no longer ex-
ists in the literary sense, and acknowledges some south-
ern authors writing in a more liberal vein such as Lil-
lian Smith and Erskine Caldwell, writers ignored by the
more elitist Agrarians. He offers extensive information
about the literary culture and writings to 1900, then
addresses the New South briefly and gives the Renas-
cence a few comments in the epilogue. Therefore his
work does not follow the growing midcentury strategy
of making the Renascence the rationale for discussing
other periods of southern literature.
f During the 1960s and 1970s, scholars C. Hugh
Holman and Louis D. Rubin Jr. authored the primary
1 texts articulating ideas of southern literature. Hol-
~ man's chief contributions include studies relating the
past to the present in southern works, an endeavor that
 832 I Southern Literature, Idea of
strengthened the official narrative of continuity in
southern literature, and offering the paradigm of three
literary Souths: the Tidewater and Low Country South,
the Piedmont and Mountain South, and the Gulf Coast
or Deep South. His practice was to relate works to
their physical, social, and moral environments, and to
the history of the southern region. His major works in-
clude "The Southerner as American Writer" (1960),
which became the lead essay in his 1972 collection,
The Roots of Southern Writing; Three Modes of South-
ern Writing (1966); The Immoderate Past (1977); and
his essay "No More Monoliths, Please" in Southern
Literature in Transition (1983), edited by Philip Cas-
tille and William Osborne. Continuing to build on his
own earlier works, Rubin became the chief architect of
the idea of southern literature in his generation, priori-
tizing the writers of the Southern Renascence. His prin-
cipal works of this period include South: Modern
Southern Literature in Its Cultural Setting (1961), an
essay collection edited with Robert D. Jacobs; The Far-
away Country: Writers of the Modern South (1963), a
collection of his essays compiled with the purpose of
using "literature in order to understand Southern life";
and The Writer in the South: Studies in Literary Com-
munity (1972), whose title underscores his longtime in-
terest in the importance of community in southern lit-
erature.
In 1970 Holman and Rubin, along with Richard
Beale Davis, edited Southern Writing: 1585-1920, an
anthology that attempts to place southern literature in
its social and cultural setting. The book exhibits a cen-
tral tension indicative of the cultural politics of its time:
it reflects the editors' efforts to promote a coherent idea
of southern literature to 1920 built upon consensus
and continuity of narrative, while simultaneously add-
ing African American works and, particularly in Dav-
is's section on the early literature, acknowledging the
past existence of voices from different literate commu-
nities shaping southern literature. Thus the ideological
influence of the Agrarians as well as a more liberal so-
cial impulse are both evident in the text. Within the
problems inherent in attempting to synthesize both tra-
ditions-one founded on continuity, another acknowl-
edging diversity-lay the seeds for future dissensus.
In 1972, Rubin and Holman, both then on the En-
glish faculty of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, convened a conference "with a view
toward providing direction and coherence in the field
of southern literary scholarship." The symposium of
the leading scholars in the field (the participants were
all male) reinforced a common vision that helped to
sustain a consensus of official literary narrative. The
proceedings were published in 1975 as Southern Liter-
ary Study: Problems and Possibilities, with Rubin and
Holman as editors.
In his 1979 classroom anthology The Literary
South, Rubin eschews cultural and social context in
favor of a New Critical approach that emphasizes liter-
ary analysis of imaginative literature. He promotes the
construction of continuity in the southern literary nar-
rative, asserting that the early literature anticipates that
of the Renascence. In his introductory comments on
the Renascence period, Rubin argues that southern
writing is distinctive in its forms and attitudes, and he
enumerates characteristics of the writing of that pe-
riod, launching a list that has been widely adopted: "a
sense of the past, an uninhibited reliance upon the full
resources of language and the old-fashioned moral ab-
solutes that lay behind such language, an attitude
toward evil as being present not only in economic or
social forces but integral to the 'fallen state' of human-
kind, a rich surface texture of description that would
not be confined to the drab hues of the naturalistic
novel, an ability to get at the full complexity of a situa-
tion rather than seeking to reduce it to its simplified es-
sentials, a suspicion of abstractions, a bias in favor of
the individual, the concrete, the unique, even the exag-
gerated and outlandish in human portraiture." Rubin
includes African American literature but still enfolds it
into the official literary narrative by pointing out that
it is "an important expression of the Southern imagina-
tion, but also an illumination of the writing of white
Southerners." Even so, his inclusion of African Ameri-
can as well as women's texts is limited.
Class is also a little-addressed issue in southern liter-
ature during these years. In his essay "Trouble on the
Land: Southern Literature and the Great Depression,"
appearing in Literature at the Barricades: The Ameri-
can Writer in the 1930s (1982), edited by Ralph F. Bo-
gardus and Fred Hobson, Rubin is one of the few
southern literary scholars to discuss the topic directly,
but his position reflects that of the majority of his
peers. He diminishes the importance of the issue, ar-
guing that most southern literature of the Renascence
did not concern itself with issues such as social con-
sciousness, capitalistic society, and class struggle.
Therefore, Rubin believes that discussing class is unim-
portant since he finds it was not a part of the southern
imagination of the writers he esteems, a view that re-

fleets the continued influence of the Agrarians' literary
elitism.
The History of Southern Literature, published in
1985 with Rubin as general editor, and Blyden Jack-
son, Rayburn S. Moore, Lewis P. Simpson, and
Thomas Daniel Young as senior editors, reflects the
cultural evolution of the ideas of southern literature as
constructed by scholars and critics from midcentury to
this point. A consensus remains tenuously intact, the
result of what seems a tacit agreement among the con-
tributors to proceed on the premise of consensus. The
continuity of narrative and privileging of the Renas-
cence remains, but the official cultural narrative has as-
sumed a more inclusive posture, embracing the impor-
tance of African American literature and women's
literature as crucial components of the story of south-
ern literature. Rubin announces in his introduction
that the editors (one of whom was Blyden Jackson, a
noted African American scholar) had from the begin-
ning "planned a racially integrated history" that would
include both white and black writers but would also
recognize "essential differences in the community heri-
tage, since to ignore those differences would produce a
distorted view of the literature." Although the text
does discuss African American and women writers,
some scholars have subsequently criticized the work
for not including more African Americans or women,
and for failing to employ a diversity of critical ap-
proaches most effectiv•. for discussing these areas, steps
that well may have endangered the consensus. Even so,
this literary history, composed of contributions from
top scholars in the field, is a powerful collective master-
work of a generation of influential critics shaping the
idea of southern literature to reflect their values and
culture. Ironically, it was also very likely the last major
work to be built on a modernist consensus of the narra-
tive of southern literature.
Since 1985, the challenges to consensus have inten-
sified. The growing appreciation for multicultural per-
spectives in the academic culture forced scholars of
southern literature to explore their implications for lit-
erary subjects. This step resulted in diversity within the
canon and in perspectives that forced fissures in the
previously valued continuity of the southern literary
narrative. Other challenges also initiated disruptions
and called for a rethinking of previously held para-
digms and ideologies. For example, calls for applica-
tion of contemporary critical theories or ones pre-
viously little used in southern literature, such as
deconstruction, new historicism, reader-response the-
Southern Literature, Idea of / 833
ory, feminist theory, cultural studies, and intellectual
history, opened the door to a plurality of voices.
The result of, as well as the impetus for, rapidly oc-
curring change in the field is much lively debate and
discussion. Many noteworthy texts are facilitating
these dialogues. Michael O'Brien's 1988 Rethinking
the South: Essays in Intellectual History calls for re-
newed vigor in southern intellectual history and study
of areas previously ignored. In The Fable of the South-
ern Writer (1994), Lewis P. Simpson explores the auto-
biographical element in southern fiction and criticism,
and in so doing contributes to the ongoing question
whether "the South is a historical or a fictional entity."
His 1988 essay in the Southern Review, "The State of
Southern Literary Scholarship," makes timely observa-
tions about literary scholarship and southern writing.
In a 1988 issue of Southern Literary Journal, Thadious
M. Davis addresses race issues in "Expanding the Lim-
its: The Intersection of Race and Region," and Rubin
endorses her comments in "Of Literature and Yams."
Rubin continues to articulate his vision of southern lit-
erature in "From Bombay to Ithaca; or, The 'Southern-
ness' of Southern Literature" and "The Dixie Special:
William Faulkner and the Southern Literary Renas-
cence," both in The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree: A
Literary Gallimaufry (1990), and he explores the foun-
dations of the southern literary imagination in The
Edge of the Swamp (1989).
In Southern Literature and Literary Theory (1990),
Jefferson Humphries presents a collection of essays
applying new theoretical approaches to southern liter-
ary works, and in his introduction he outlines a vision
for the work of the first postmodern generation of
southern literary scholars. Michael Kreyling's Invent-
ing Southern Literature (1998) also pushes southern
thought into the postmodern era through a critical ex-
amination of the invention of the modernist southern
literary narrative and the manipulations that held to-
gether that consensus for many years. Also noteworthy
to a study of the idea of southern literature is Fred
Hobson's 1991 essay in the Southern Review, "Survey-
ors and Boundaries: Southern Literature and Southern
Literary Criticism After Mid-Century," which analyzes
the formation of the southern literary canon since
1920, examines the contemporary canon, and specu-
lates on the future. Hobson's The Southern Writer in
the Postmodern World (1991) takes a look at the char-
acteristics of some prominent writers emerging since
the 1960s.
Feminist theory and efforts to recover neglected
 834 I Southern Literature, Idea of
southern voices have given momentum to the growing
recognition of southern women's texts as a literature
with its own unique characteristics. Anne Goodwyn
Jones published the groundbreaking study in the field,
Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the
South, 1859-1936, in 1981. In Daughters of Time:
Creating Woman's Voice in Southern Story (1990), Lu-
cinda H. MacKethan examines both black and white
women writers' strategies for developing their own
forms of expression in a patriarchal South. Essays in
The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (1993),
edited by Carol Manning, survey the development of
women writers in the South. Mary Louise Weaks and
Carolyn Perry edited an anthology, Southern Women's
Writing: Colonial to Contemporary, in 1995. Jones
and Susan V. Donaldson's collection of essays Haunted
Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (1997) explores
the impact of southern definitions of both masculinity
and femininity.
Two anthologies give insights into the status of
ideas of southern literature at century's end. Edward L.
Ayers and Bradley C. Mittendorf edited The Oxford
Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory, and
Fiction (1997), which places ideologically conflicting
voices and perspectives side by side in an effort to con-
vey the fabric of dissensus characterizing major eras of
southern history. Likewise, The Literature of the
American South: A Norton Anthology (1998) em- '
braces dissensus, seeing southern writing as "an on-
going dialogue and/or debate among various ethnic, ra-
cial, social, and economic perspectives on what the
South was, is, and ought to be and on the character,
culture, and communities of its people." Edited by Wil-
liam L. Andrews (general editor), Minrose C. Gwin,
Trudier Harris, and Fred Hobson, the anthology rejects
earlier ideologies shaping a consensus of southern liter-
ature and instead champions · the diversity of the
South's cultural heritage. The project stands as a
marker in the continuing evolution of the idea of
southern literature from a white, patriarchal, elitist lit- ful. It does not address issues of social, economic, or
erature to one opening to the possibilities of voices
from varying races, gender orientations, and socio-eco-
nomic classes.
As the field of southern literature acknowledges di-
versity and dissensus, and new theories and cultural
politics subvert old interpretations and paradigms, the
ability to articulate an idea of southern literature or lit- largest regional ~agazine in the United States and one
eratures becomes increasingly difficult. Ironically, at
the start of the twenty-first century, as the idea that
there is an idea of southern literature flourishes in the
popular culture, scholars and critics find the task of
pronouncing the idea(s) of southern literature ever
more quixotic.
Susan H. Irons
See also Academy, Southern Literature and the; Agrarians; An-
thologies of Southern Literature; Histories of Southern Litera-
ture; New Criticism.
John E. Bassett, Defining Southern Literature: Perspectives and
Assessments, 1831-1952 (1997).
SOUTHERN LWING
Begun as a section in The Progressive Farmer titled
"The Progressive Home" (retitled "Southern Living"
in October 1963), a new monthly magazine made its
debut as a separate publication, Southern Living, in
February 1966. At a time when the South was chang-
ing rapidly from a rural to a more urban region, South-
ern Living targeted families who often lived in suburbs,
owned their homes, and enjoyed cooking, gardening,
entertaining, travel, and home-improvement projects.
Advance marketing to a select audience produced an
initial paid subscription of 250,000 for this self-styled
magazine of the modern South.
The color cover of the first ninety-page issue indi-
cated the magazine's formula-a brick ranch house; a
bright, sunny day; a well-kept green lawn with azaleas
in full bloom; two young women on a tandem bike;
and a dog. The table of contents featured sections on
travel, general topics, homes, foods and entertaining,
fashions and grooming, outdoor recreation, and gar-
dening and landscaping. Only the section on fashions
and grooming no longer survives. In July 1967 (vol. 2,
no. 6) the format changed to a smaller, more contem-
porary-looking style.
Southern Living's formula has been quite success-
health concerns, and only relatively recently have arti-
cles featured people or places reflecting the varying ra-
cial makeup of the South. The magazine concentrates
on home and garden and travel, with some recent brief
but good features on the literature of the South. Cur-
rent circulation of about 2.3 million makes SL the
of the largest of all types in the country.
Time Inc. bought the Birmingham, Alabama-based
Southern Progress Publishing Company in 1985. Re-

cent so-called "brand extensions" have led to SL cook-
books, cooking and gardening seminars, house plans,
credit cards, a travel service, even a spinoff of one of its
food columns, a magazine called Cooking Light. An-
other recent venture is Coastal Living, designed for
those who live at the beach. Despite jokes that Time
Inc.'s New York staff sometimes call the Southern
Progress offices in Birmingham just to hear the south-
ern accents, there's no joking about the success of
Southern Living.
Alice R. Cotten
Jeff Gremillion, "Whistlin' in Dixie: Time Inc.'s Quietly Suc-
cessful Southern Cousin Is Poised for More Brand Extensions
and a 'Coastal' Expansion," Mediaweek (July 1, 1996); John
Logue and Gary McCalla, Life at "Southern Living" (2000);
Sam G. Riley, Magazines of the American South (1986).
SOUTHERN RENASCENCE
During the first half of the twentieth century, a major
reawakening of literary activity took place in the
American South. This writing encompassed fiction,
poetry, drama, literary criticism, memoir, and journal-
ism. The Southern Literary Renascence (also spelled
Renaissance) involved a critical reexamination of
southern history, a new awareness of the restrictions of
traditional racial and gender roles, an interest in liter-
ary experimentation, an examination of the role of the
southern artist in relation to the southern community,
and an increasingly realistic presentation of social con-
ditions in the South. With the indisputable accomplish-
· · ments of many of its writers, this revival of literary ac-
tivity secured the place of modern southern writing
within the national literature.
The origins of the Renascence have been traced to
the gradual revival of southern culture following the
destruction during and after the Civil War. George
Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Grace King, and
Mark Twain may be viewed as part of an early phase
of the southern reawakening. The works of these late-
nineteenth-century writers established a tradition of
modern critical sensibility that continued in the works
of James Branch Cabell, Ellen Glasgow, William Faulk-
n~r, Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora
Welty, and Tennessee Williams. This sensibility was
more open to influences from outside the South and
more critical of the South's own cultural traditions. By
examining their region with a more trenchant gaze, the
Southern Renascence / 835
writers of the Renascence produced works that re-
vealed the region's social conflicts and cultural weak-
nesses even as their efforts advanced the South's liter-
ary reputation.
Various explanations have been offered to account
for the revival of modern southern writing. In an oft-
quoted phrase from "The New Provincialism," Allen
Tate spoke of the "backward gaze" of the South to ex-
plain the reawakening after World War I. According to
this theory, the modern southern writer stood at the
boundary between the traditional southern agrarian
culture and the modern, increasingly industrial new
order. At this "crossing of the ways," the southern
writer experienced both nostalgia for the past and a
sense of critical distance from it. Later critics have of:...
fere.rl a similar historical explanation. Various social
and cultural factors are assumed to have contributed to
the literary reawakening: the increasing industrializa-
tion of the South, the experiences of southern veterans
in World War I, the influence of Lost Generation val-
ues, a new literary climate (the influence of Sinclair
Lewis and Sherwood Anderson was particularly strong
in the South), and the region's reaction against its own
sentimental tradition.
Although theories that emphasize the centrality of
memory and history in southern writing have been pro-
ductive and influential, they have not gone unchal-
lenged. For those who focus on the African American
contribution to southern writing, the experience of
modern African American writers may not be so
readily explained by "the shock of recognition" of pas-
sage from agrarian to modern society. For these writ-
ers, the essential factor is not the influence of modern-
ization or international modernism but the struggle for
racial equality. African American members of the Re-
nascence, including Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurs-
!On, and Jean Toomer, do evince a concern with the
southern past and with the impact of modernization,
but their perspective on the South is distinctly different
from that of the major white writers. Unlike Faulkner's
attitude toward the agrarian South, which may be
characterized as ambivalent, Wright's depiction of the
same society in Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Black
Boy (1945), and Twelve Million Black Voices (1941) is
decidedly negative. Hurston in Their Eyes Were
Watching God and Toomer in Cane made significant
artistic uses of southern black agrarian and folk so-
ciety.
Feminist critics offer other reasons for the reawak-
ening of southern writing: the reaction of women writ-
 836 / Southern Renascence
ers against a patriarchal culture, the development of a
tradition of southern women's writing, the loosening
and challenging of social restrictions on women, and
the growing independence of women. In challenging
assumptions concerning the characteristics and dating
of the Renascence, feminist critics have reevaluated
many neglected authors, particularly those who were
sometimes dismissed as "precursors" to the Renas-
cence, including Kate Chopin and Ellen Glasgow. Kate
Chopin, writing at the end of the nineteenth century,
challenged assumptions about the role of women in
southern society in The Awakening (1899) and numer-
ous short stories (posthumously published). Beginning
her literary career relatively late in life, Chopin pro-
duced work in the local-color tradition (including the
collections Bayou Folk, 1894, and A Night in Acadie,
1897) as well as works that included an even more re-
alistic depiction and astrjngent critique of contempo-
rary gender relations.
Ellen Glasgow is crucial to any informed interpreta-
tion of the Renascence. Glasgow's novels were well
ahead of their time in their unusual quality of social re-
alism. Beginning with The Voice of the People (1900),
Glasgow produced a series of novels set in Richmond,
Virginia, that offered an intensely realistic depiction of
social manners and mores. Her critical stance toward
her native region resulted in ironic depictions of south-
ern honor and chivalry, as in her Civil War and Recon-
struction novels The Battle-Ground (1902) and The
Deliverance (1904). Glasgow's most important novels,
especially in terms of her analysis of southern gender
roles, are Virginia (1913), Life and Gabriella (1916),
Barren Ground (1922), The Romantic Comedians
(1926), and The Sheltered Life (1932}.
Critical studies by Thadious Davis (Faulkner's
"Negro": Art and the Southern Context), Minrose
Gwin (Black and White Women of the Old South: The
Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature, 1985),
Anne Goodwyn Jones (Tomorrow Is Another Day:
The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936, 1981),
and Lucinda MacKethan (Daughters of Time: Creating
Woman's Voice in Southern Story, 1992), among oth-
ers, have expanded our understanding of the Renas-
cence in terms of race and gender. Carol S. Manning's
The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (1993) of-
fers correction to conventional interpretations. Focus-
ing on the Renascence, the essays in this collection raise
many questions concerning the formation of canon, the
"sources" of the Renascence, the central images and
stereotypes of women in Renascence writing, the the-
matic concerns of southern women writers, and the ar-
tistic standards of judgment involved in canon forma-
tion.
Literary and intellectual movements outside the
South influenced the critical temper displayed by many
Renascence authors. In part, southern writers were re-
sponding to the broader movements of naturalism and
modernism that were transforming modern literature
as a whole. Writers such as Chopin and James Branch
Cabell were well aware of national and international
literary innovations. Determined to work outside the
traditional southern modes of local color and romance,
Cabell based his work on more-cosmopolitan influ-
ences, on European literary forms (the picaresque
novel and Arthurian romance), and the contemporary
vogue for witty, cosmopolitan satire. His novel Jurgen
(1919), set in an imaginary medieval realm, became a
national sensation.
Faulkner, Ransom, Tate, Welty, and Wright were as
much influenced by international modernism as they
were by southern experience and tradition. Part of the
influence of modernism was the use of local settings for
broader symbolic purposes. The local subject matter of
southern writers was transformed into myth in the
same way that Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Hemingway, and
Pound, employing what Eliot termed the "mythic
method," transformed their particular regional back-
grounds and historical experience into more universal
significance. Faulkner looked to the past, both to the
mythologized antebellum aristocracy and to the heroic
accounts of the Civil War, with nostalgia but also with
an informed irony and critical distance. Beginning with
Sartoris (1929) (reissued in its original longer version
as Flags in the Dust in 1972}, Faulkner wrote fifteen
novels and numerous short stories set in the mythical
Yoknapatawpha County. The major novels in the cycle
are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying
(1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942). Tension between
modern alienation and traditional community is a key
element in Faulkner's work. His attitude is highly am-
bivalent toward the South, and his fiction comprises a
searching critique of southern tradition and institu-
tions. Well before the advent of the modern Civil
Rights Movement, Faulkner depicted the legacies of
slavery as the "curse" of the South. In numerous works
he revealed the hypocrisy and destructiveness of tradi-
tional southern racial attitudes.
Faulkner's writing reflects many of the elements of
international modernism that would also influence

Wolfe, Welty, and other writers of the Renascence. In
The Sound and the Fury, he employed innovative tech-
nical devices such as the use of discontinuous chronol-
ogy and the layering of time periods within the con-
sciousness of a character. By dividing the narrative into
four sections, told from the perspective of three broth-
ers (Benjamin, Quentin, and Jason Compson) and
Dilsey, the Compsons' house servant, Faulkner pre-
sented multiple perspectives of the same family history.
To an even greater extent, he employed this experimen-
tal method in As I Lay Dying, the comic grotesque ac-
count of the death and burial of Addie Bundren. Faulk-
ner continued to experiment with technique in his use
of contrasting sections of narrative in The Wild Palms
(1939) and in his ambitious allegorical novel, A Fable
(1954).
Faulkner wrote compelling social realism while
undercutting the myths of the Old South. Although
characters such as Gail Hightower in Light in August
or Isaac McCaslin in Go Down, Moses are dominated
by their idealistic illusions about the southern past, in
particular about the Civil War and the ethos of the
southern aristocracy, Faulkner himself consistently dis-
played a more skeptical and realistic attitude toward
the mythic past of his region. Through the character of
Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner was
able to explore the contradictions and shortcomings of
the plantation aristocracy and, more generally, of the
southern past. In this respect, Faulkner's fiction dis-
plays the same quality of artistic distance from its sub-
ject that is apparent in the works of most of the leading
writers of the Renascence.
Faulkner's depiction of women frequently disre-
garded conventional attitudes. In The Sound and the
Fury, the servant Dilsey emerges as a resourceful and
humane woman who attempts to hold together both
her own and the Compson families. Temple Drake of
Sanctuary (1931) is a version of the contemporary
"flapper" or emancipated woman, but in Faulkner's
novel she is depicted in decidedly negative terms as an
irresponsible and decadent young woman. In Sartoris,
Aunt Jenny Dupre is surrounded by defeated southern
men but reveals tenacious strength and discipline, even
though these qualities are accompanied by an aggres-
sive defense of the Old Order. Numerous women char-
acters in Faulkner's novels, including Lena Grove and
Joanna Burden (Light in August), Eula Varner Snopes
(The Hamlet), Charlotte Rittenmeyer (The Wild
Palms), and Molly Beauchamp (Go Down, Moses),
have gripped the imagination of readers.
Southern Renascence / 837
Malcolm Cowley's 1946 edition of The Portable
Faulkner was highly influential in securing recognition
for Faulkner's work. Complete with Faulkner's own
maps and Cowley's introduction, it demonstrated to a
large audience that Faulkner's writing, at that time
largely out of print, comprised a coherent body of
major work. Cowley recognized Faulkner's accom-
plishment in the creation of the mythic county of Yok-
napatawpha, and he revealed the breadth of Faulkner's
social and historical canvas. The awarding of the 1950
Nobel Prize for Literature to Faulkner secured his-;_:ep-
utation and opened the way for the serious study not
only of Faulkner but of southern literature as an aca-
demic discipline.
Faulkner was clearly the major figure of the Renas-
cence, but he was only one of a number of writers who
produced innovative works of fiction based on rural
and small-town locales. With his autobiographical
novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Thomas Wolfe
won national and international fame. Although Wolfe
died short of his thirty-eighth birthday nine years later,
Faulkner judged that Wolfe's imagination and writing
(three other long novels and numerous shorter works)
placed him near the top of his generation. Wolfe's
work was representative of the youth-oriented culture
of his times. His romanticism, his focus on adoles-
cence, and his acerbic treatment of conventional soci-
ety connect his work with the intellectual rebellion of
the 1920s.
Wolfe's writing gave voice to what has been termed
the "other South," the Appalachian region that was
largely nonslaveholding during the antebellum period
and was often of Union sympathy during the Civil War.
A number of other Appalachian writers emerged dur-
ing the Renascence. Harriette Simpson Arnow was the
author of Mountain Path (1936, published under her
maiden name Harriet Simpson), Hunter's Horn
(1949), The Dollmaker (1954), Seedtime on the Cum-
berland (1960), and other novels. Jesse Stuart's best-
known work is The Thread That Runs So True (1949),
his vivid record of a teacher's daily existence in rural
Appalachia. James Still wrote realistically about the or-
deals and joys of rural life in River of Earth (1940), On
Troublesome Creek (1941), and Pattern of a Man and
Other Stories (1980). In addition to writing fiction,
Stuart and Still were talented poets. Man with a Bull-
Tongue Plow (1934) is Stuart's collection of 703 son-
nets. These writers share an ability to convey human
experience in strong, direct prose and realistic imagery.
They write of Appalachian people whose lives are de-
 838 / Southern Renascence
fined by physical struggle and economic limitations but
who also discover sources of strength in their cultural
he~itage and social communities.
l Robert Penn Warren'~ career gave abundant evi-
dence that a renascence was underway in the South. A
philosophical novelist, Warren nevertheless could grip
the average reader. His famous All the King's Men
(1946) was recast as a stage play and later became a
major motion picture. Warren's central theme was the
disorder and violence of the world of experience, and
the necessity of human control of man's corrupt nature
through thought and restraint. In other novels as well,
Warren probed the modern South, but his chief love
was poetry, and he ranks with the major American
poets of the twentieth century. In addition to writing
many short poems, Warren tackled the long narrative
poem. Brother to Dragons (1953), Audubon: A Vision
(1969), and Chief Joseph (1982) show his concern with
the pastoral and demonstrate his force in the long
poem. With Cleanth Brooks (with whom he taught and
collaborated), he helped establish the New Criticism.
One of the writers encouraged by Warren and
Brooks was Eudora Welty. Beginning in the 1930s with
short stories published in the Southern Review, Welty
has produced a body of work over a period of five dec-
ades that includes ten volumes of short stories, five
novels, works of criticism, memoirs, and miscellaneous
writing. Her novels are The Robber Bridegroom
(1944), Delta Wedding (1947), The Ponder Heart
(1954), The Optimist's Daughter (1972), and Losing
Battles (1982). Her collections of short stories include
A Curtain of Green (1943), The Wide Net and Other
Stories (1943), and The Golden Apples (1950). Often
focusing on rural and small-town life in Mississippi,
Welty's fiction is at once intensely local and broadly
universal. Her use of myth and folk elements provides
a depth of human interest. In their representation of
southern domesticity and their focus on women's lives,
her stories implicitly examine traditional gender as-
sumptions.
Like Warren and Faulkner, many Renascence au-
thors conducted a reexamination of the southern past.
Other distinguished historical novels include Elizabeth
Madox Roberts's The Time of Man (1926), T. S. Stri-
bling's trilogy (The Forge, 1931; The Store, 1932; and
The Unfinished Cathedral, 1934), Evelyn Scott's The
Wave (1929), and Shelby Foote's Tournament (1949).
Andrew Lytle's The Velvet Horn (1957), the story of
the Cropleigh family during Reconstruction, depicts
the values and consciousness of the southern common
folk. Frank Yerby's trilogy of novels (The Foxes of
Harrow, 1946; The Vixens, 1947; Pride's Castle,
1948) was focused on nineteenth-century southern his-
tory. Among the many Renascence authors who wrote
Civil War fiction were John Peale Bishop (Many Thou-
sands Gone, 1931),James Boyd (Marching On, 1927),
Clifford Dowdey (Bugles Blow No More, 1937), Caro-
line Gordon (None Shall Look Back, 1937), Margaret
Mitchell (Gone With the Wind, 1936), Allen Tate (The
Fathers, 1938), and Stark Young (So Red the Rose,
1934).
A number of novels addressed contemporary social
issues. Major southern black writers from the Renas-
cence include Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston,
Jean Toomer, Walter Francis White, and Richard
Wright. In his novel Native Son (1940), Wright created
an archetypal figure in the character of Bigger Thomas,
a young black man living in Chicago during the 1930s.
Wright's short stories in Uncle Tom's Children (1938)
and his autobiographical narrative Black Boy (1945)
are among his major works. Other than fiction, Wright
published works of social reportage (Twelve Million
Black Voices, 1941) and travel writing, including Black
Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos
(1954), Pagan Spain (1957), and The Color Curtain: A
Report on the Bandung Conference (1956). Wright's
later novels, which achieved less critical success, are
The Outsider (1956), Savage Holiday (1954), and The
Long Dream (1958). A posthumous collection of short
stories was entitled Eight Men (1961).
Like Wright, many African American writers emi-
grated from the South. Zora Neale Hurston, who was
raised in Eatonville, Florida, but lived much of her
adult life in the North, wrote memorable fiction, in-
cluding Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1937), and a major study of
southern black folklore, Mules and Men (1935). Al-
though he was born in Louisiana, Arna Bontemps was
raised in California, returning only later to the South
to serve as Fisk University librarian in Nashville. Bon-
temps produced Black Thunder (1936), a novel based
on Gabriel Prosser's slave rebellion. Although he lived
mostly outside the South, Jean Toomer based his novel
Cane (1923) on his brief period as a school principal in
rural Georgia. Missouri-born Langston Hughes is
sometimes counted in the Southern Literary Renas-
cence, though he grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas,
and Cleveland, Ohio. His poetry and prose reflect tra-
ditional sources of southern black storytelling and
speech.

At the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Move-
ment, Margaret Walker wrote For My People (1942),
an important collection of protest poetry. Many south-
ern immigrants contributed to the Harlem Renais-
sance, the major reawakening of African American lit-
erature that began in the 1920s. These writers include
Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, and Walter
White. James Weldon Johnson, a black writer from
Florida, confronted his southern heritage memorably
in the novel Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
(1912) and his poem sequence God's Trombones
(1927).
Other African American writers who may be con-
sidered members of the Southern Renascence are
George Wylie Henderson (Ollie Miss, 1935), George
Washington Lee (River George, 1937), Waters Turpin
(These Low Grounds, 1937), and William Attaway. As
J. Lee Greene points out, a standard device of African
American southern fiction is the "flight-from-violence"
theme structuring such novels as Turpin's O Canaan!
(1939) and Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941). A
protest school of black writers developed this theme
after the appearance of Wright's Native Son in 1940.
Several white southerners wrote novels about Afri-
can Americans. These include Stribling's Birthright
(1922), DuBose Heyward's Porgy (1925), Faulkner's
Light in August, and novels by Julia Peterkin and Gil-
more Millen. Later southern whites who wrote novels
about race included Erskine Caldwell (Trouble in July,
1940) and Lillian Smith (Strange Fruit, 1944). The
genre has remained vital in post-Renascence southern
writing, in such works as William Styron's Confessions
of Nat Turner (1967) and Lewis Nordan's Wolf-Whis-
tle (1995), and in the many portraits of black charac-
ters in works by Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy,
Richard Ford, and others.
In the same way that African American writers fo-
cused on the issue of race, southern proletarian writers
examined differences of social class. In several sensa-
tionalistic novels, including Tobacco Road (1932) and
God's Little Acre (1933), Erskine Caldwell popular-
ized grotesque images of "poor white trash." In stage
plays and films, his works brought social inequalities
to light at the same time that they perpetuated debasing
images of southern people.
In his Renaissance in the South (1963), John Brad-
bury reconsidered many Renascence writers who had
been neglected by previous critics. Edith Summers Kel-
ley was among the first southern writers to portray the
working class sympathetically and realistically. Among
Southern Renascence / 839
social critics, Grace Lumpkin, who began as a Marxist,
wrote of the exploitation of agricultural labor. Lump-
kin was just one of a number of southern writers who
addressed sharecropping issues during the 1930s.
James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a
memorable work of nonfiction reportage, based on his
two-month residence among three Alabama sharecrop-
per families. Influenced by the liberalism of the 1930s,
southern radical voices included Myra Page, Leana
Zugsmith, and Olive Dargan (who wrote as "Fielding
Burke"). Harry H. Kroll also wrote critiques of the
southern sharecropping system. Hodding Carter, Allen
Drury, and Evans Harrington were southern liberals
who produced political novels.
The Renascence included several major dramatists
and a number of important poets. Among the drama-
tists, Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams)
gained an international reputation for early works such
as The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named
Desire (1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).
During his long and productive career, Williams won
two Pulitzer Prizes and four New York Drama Critics
Circle Awards. Although his later works were less suc-
cessful, both critically and in terms of popular success,
Williams continued to produce dramatic work until his
death in 1983. Williams's powerful psychological dra-
mas, some of which were adapted for film by Elia
Kazan, portrayed disturbing mental conflicts. In doing
so, these works significantly altered American attitudes
and social assumptions toward the dispossessed and
outcast figures that he chose to represent. Williams was
also a prolific author of fiction and memoirs.
Lillian Hellman emerged as the first major woman
dramatist from the South. The Little Foxes (1939) and
Another Part of the Forest (1946) explore greed and
exploitation in a Louisiana setting that evokes the
plantation heritage. The Autumn Garden (1957) and
Toys in the Attic (1960) also have southern settings,
though her other plays do not. The Children's Hour
(1934) boldly took on a lesbian theme. She confronted
the Nazi horror in Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The
Searching Wind (1944). Paul Green pioneered outdoor
drama and wrote several plays-such as In Abraham's
Bosom (1926), The Field God (1927), and The House
of Connelly (1928)-and stories that probed southern
realism. Carson McCullers achieved success with stage
and screen versions of her novel The Member of the
Wedding (1950).
During the Southern Renascence, poetry also gained
national attention it had scarcely known before. Its
 840 / Southern Renascence
fountain was the Fugitive and Agrarian nexus at Van-
derbilt University, mentored by John Crowe Ransom.
In addition to Robert Penn Warren, the movement in-
cluded Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Merrill
Moore. Though not a member of the Fugitives, poet
John Peale Bishop was born in West Virginia and was
closely associated with Allen Tate. The group orches-
trated much of the New Criticism.
Ransom's critical essays began to appear in the late
1930s (including "Criticism, Inc." in 1938 and "The
New Criticism" in 1941). Ransom formulated an ap-
proach to interpretation that came to be highly influ-
ential and reflected distrust of abstraction. The New
Critics stressed the interpretation of works of literature
exclusive of "external" factors (such as biographical,
sociological, political, or historical interpretations).
Their call to students and critics was to "experience"
the work of literature on its own merits, through the
analysis of complex literary structures, images, and
meanings. In "Literature as Knowledge" (1940) and
other influential essays, Allen Tate found that the disso-
ciation of modern thought and feeling underlay the
aesthetic fragmentation of modern literature.
In addition to those figures mentioned previously,
the Renascence produced many other writers of merit.
In a series of stories ("Old Mortality," "Pale Horse,
Pale Rider," and the cycle of stories published as The
Old Order, 1944), Katherine Anne Porter created the
character of Miranda, a figure who looks to the past
matriarchs in her family as models of a meaningful tra-
dition. Porter differed from many southern modernists
in her liberal politics, humanistic values, and secure
sense of family history. Porter's best-known stories in-
clude "Maria Concepcion" (1922) and "Flowering
Judas" (1930). Caroline Gordon wrote in the realist
tradition of James, Chekhov, and Joyce. Gordon's Pen-
hally (1931) traced the Llewellyn family saga in Ken-
tucky. Gordon wrote in the tradition of the novel of
manners, especially in The Women on the Porch (1944)
and The Strange Children (1951).
No consensus exists regarding the end date of the
Southern Renascence, but most critics regard the 1950s
as the point when the original Renascence gave way to
the emergence of a new generation (sometimes termed
the "second southern renaissance"). Although it is in-
disputable that the 1950s saw the emergence of a new
generation, there was little sense of decline in the out-
pouring of southern writing. Some of the southern au-
thors who established reputations in the period after
World War II include A. R. Ammons, John Barth, Tru-
man Capote, James Dickey, Ralph Ellison, Shelby
Foote, Ernest J. Gaines, George Garrett, Bowen In-
gram, Randall Jarrell, Madison Jones, Carson McCull-
e_!s, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price,
Elizabeth Spencer, Peter Taylor, and William Styron.
Regardless of when one dates its end point, the
Southern Renascence must be viewed as a major move-
ment in twentieth-century American literature. Its writ-
ers brought a new critical temper and self-conscious-
ness to the representation of their region, and they
broadened the subject matter for literature while ex-
panding the approaches with which that subject might
be depicted. In contrast to the parochialism and senti-
mentality of much earlier southern writing, writers of
the Renascence displayed an interest in realism and
naturalism as narrative forms. Their association with
international literary movements such as modernism
revealed a more cosmopolitan perspective on their art.
In their greater realism, awareness, and complexity, the
writers of the Southern Renascence participated in a
major revival of literary art in the South.
Jeffrey J. Folks
See also Agrarians; Faulkner, William; Harlem Renaissance;
New Criticism; Proletarian Novel; Warren, Robert Penn;
Welty, Eudora; Williams, Tennessee.
John Bradbury, Renaissance in the South: A Critical History of
the Literature, 1920-1960 (1963); Hazel V. Carby, Recon-
structing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American
Woman Novelist (1987); Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie,
Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance (1982); Richard Gray,
The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American
South (1977); C. Hugh Holman, Three Modes of Modern
Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas
Wolfe (1966); Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another
Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (1981);
Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awak-
ening of the American South, 1930-1955 (1980); Carol S.
Manning, The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (1993);
Louis D. Rubin Jr. and Robert D. Jacobs, Southern Renas-
cence: The Literature of the Modern South (1953); Louis D.
Rubin Jr., The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South
(1963); Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within: From Victorian
to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (1982).
SOUTHERN REVIEW
The establishment of the Southern Review in 1935 at
Louisiana State University-then a small provincial
university, located in Baton Rouge, the unpopulous

capital city of an exotic but backward southern state-
was owing to the presence on the campus of three sin-
gularly gifted and ambitious young southern men of
letters: Charles W. Pipkin, a Rhodes Scholar and bril-
liant political scientist, who had been made dean of the
LSU Graduate School at the age of twenty-nine;
Cleanth Brooks, a promising literary scholar and critic,
who had joined the LSU English faculty after complet-
ing two years at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and Rob-
ert Penn Warren, already a published poet and biogra-
pher, who had preceded Brooks at Oxford as a Rhodes
Scholar by a year, and after teaching at Vanderbilt had
joined Brooks on the LSU English faculty. The three ar-
rived in Louisiana's capital city at the very moment
when a still-youthful politician, driven by a ruthless
ambition for power-yet, as Robert B. Heilman has
said, possessed by "an imaginativeness which could
grasp ends beyond power and profit"-was, even in
the depths of the Great Depression, providing unprece-
dented funding for one of his favorite projects, the
making of a great state university in Louisiana. To this
end, Huey Long's handpicked president of LSU, James
Monroe Smith, had become interested in involving
LSU in the publication of a literary quarterly. When the
effort on the part of Pipkin, Brooks, and Warren to cre-
ate a satisfactory association between LSU and the
Southwest Review at Southern Methodist University
failed, Smith supplied a handsome fund for the publi-
cation of a quarterly at LSU. Pipkin was appointed edi-
tor-in-chief, and Brooks and Warren were made man-
aging editors. Albert Erskine, then a graduate student
at LSU, was given the post of business manager,
though, Warren recalled, Erskine "was as much an edi-
tor as anybody else." (When Erskine resigned in 1940,
he was replaced by John Ellis Palmer. Palmer, however,
was given the title "Managing Editor" and Brooks and
Warren were elevated to equal status with Pipkin.
When Pipkin died in 1941, no replacement was
named.)
Having been assured by Smith that there would be
no political interference in their endeavor, Pipkin,
Brooks, and Warren brought out the first issue of the
Southern Review in the summer of 1935. Although
only two months later Long was struck down by an as-
sassin's bullet in the splendid new state capitol he had
built in Baton Rouge, funding for the magazine contin-
ued during the crisis that came when the greed of those
who sought to perpetuate the Long regime resulted in
the "Louisiana scandals" of 1939-1940 and James
Monroe Smith was indicted for fraud and imprisoned.
Southern Review I 841
But in 1942 the first series of the Southern Review be-
came a casualty of World War II. Citing the need to
support the American war effort at an institution with
a large ROTC cadet corps and a strong military tradi-
tion, the LSU administration cancelled the subsidy that
had sustained the magazine, and it ceased publication
with the completion of the seventh volume.
In its brief existence, the original series of the South-
ern Review had demonstrated such a remarkable liter-
ary and intellectual quality that it not only achieved
widespread recognition in its day but has acquired a
lasting niche in the literary history of the South, the na-
tion, and, it may be said, the general history of modern
letters. Indeed, one reason for its fame was its catholic-
ity. This disappointed some advocates of southern
Agrarianism, who had expected that, since Brooks and
Warren were still enlisted in this movement, the South-
ern Review would be a source of renewed support for
this fading cause. But Brooks and Warren were far less
interested in political and economic movements than in
modern movements in poetry, fiction, and literary criti-
cism. Exercising the comparatively free hand they al-
ways had as managing editors of the magazine, they
devoted themselves to attracting the invigorating cos-
mopolitan mix of established and promising new writ-
ers that graced the pages of the first series of the South-
ern Review: among them, T. S. Eliot, William Empson,
Ford Madox Ford, and Paul Valery, as well as Wallace
Stevens, Delmore Schwartz, R. P. Blackmur, Herbert
Agar, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ran-
som, Andrew Lytle, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne
Porter, Eudora Welty, and Brooks and Warren them-
selves. Thus transcending the parochial, drawn not
only from the South but from other parts of the nation
and from abroad, the authorship of the 1935-1942
Southern Review established its context in modern lit-
erature as a whole.
The editors of the Southern Review that began pub-
lication with the winter issue 1965-Lewis P. Simpson
and Donald E. Stanford of the LSU English faculty,
coeditors; and Rima Drell Reck of the foreign language
faculty of Louisiana State University at New Orleans
(now the University of New Orleans), associate edi-
tor-recognized the radical differences between the lit-
erary situation in their time and the time of the editors
of the original series, yet they aspired to locate the sec-
ond series in a literary context approximately similar
to the one that the first had claimed. Although the edi-
torial staff of the second series has changed during the
thirty-four years of its existence-at present it is edited
 842 / Southern Review
by James Olney and Dave Smith of the LSU English
faculty, with Michael Griffith as associate editor and
Niccola Mason as assistant editor-the Southern Re-
view continues to reflect a cosmopolitan diversity in its
authorship and at the same time to assert its context in
the national and the southern literary expression. But
with a difference. In 1985 the Southern Review that
was established in 1965 celebrated its continuity with
the Southern Review that began publication in 1935 by
bringing out three special issues. One, devoted to the
Anglo-American and, in a very real sense, European
author T. S. Eliot, served to represent both the cosmo-
politan and national contexts of the magazine; and an-
other, published under the rubric "The Southern
Writer," the regional context. But the third special
issue, devoted to African American writing, indicated a
great change that has occurred in the contextual frame
of the Southern Review in the second half of the twen-
tieth century.
Lewis P. Simpson
See also Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Kenyon Review; Louisiana
State University.
Thomas W. Cutrer, Parnassus on the Mississippi: The "South-
ern Review" and the Baton Rouge Literary Community, 1935-
1942 (1984); James A. Grimshaw Jr., ed., Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence (1998);
Lewis P. Simpson, James Olney, Jo Gulledge, eds., The "South-
ern Review" and Modern Literature, 1935-1985 (1988).
SOUTH IN THE BUILDING OF THE NATION,
THE
The South in the Building of the Nation (1909) is a
thirteen-volume series offering a political, economic,
social, intellectual, and literary history of the American
South from the sixteenth century to the opening of the
twentieth century. The work's full title states its pur-
pose: The South in the Building of the Nation: A His-
tory of the Southern States Designed to Record the
South's Part in the Making of the American Nation; to
Portray the Character and Genius, to Chronicle the
Achievements and Progress and to Illustrate the Life
and Traditions of the Southern People. Copyrighted in
1909 and published by the Southern Publication Soci-
ety (first named the Southern Historical Publishing So-
ciety), a group formed with the purpose of developing
the series, its volumes reflect the New South perspec-
tive of its southern academic editors.
This text embodies an effort by southern cultural
leaders to strengthen the South's national profile fol-
lowing years of northern cultural dominance in the
United States. Produced in a time of growing national-
ism, the work endeavors to move beyond sectionalist
sentiment while simultaneously asserting the South's
unique regional identity and its vital role in the nation's
history. Reflecting the agenda of the economic and po-
litical New South movement, this work intends both to
redefine the South's cultural status within the country
and to engender regional pride among southerners,
thus hoping to garner increased power and influence
for the South within the nation.
Originally planned as an eight-volume series, The
South in the Building of the Nation grew to include
thirteen topically organized volumes, each edited by a
leading scholar in the field. In turn, these editors as-
serted that they selected only the scholars best qualified
to write the individual entries. The "History of the
States," originally slated for one volume, became vol-
umes I (Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, West Virginia,
North Carolina), II (Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Ar-
kansas, Texas), and III (South Carolina, Georgia, Ala-
bama, Mississippi, Tennessee). Julian Alvin Carroll
Chandler, professor of history at Richmond College,
edited these volumes. Each subsequent volume focuses
on a particular aspect of southern history: Volume IV,
Political History (edited by Franklin Lafayette Riley,
University of Mississippi); Volumes V and VI, Eco-
nomic History (edited by James Curtis Ballagh, Johns
Hopkins University); Volume VII, History of Literary
and Intellectual Life (edited by John Bell Hennemann,
University of the South, who upon his death was suc-
ceeded by W. P. Trent, Columbia University); Volume
VIII, History of Southern Fiction (edited by Edwin
Mims, University of North Carolina); Volume IX, His-
tory of Southern Oratory (eaited by Thomas E. Wat-
son, author); Volume X, History of the Social Life (ed-
ited by Samuel Chiles Mitchell, University of South
Carolina); Volumes XI and XII, Southern Biography
(edited by Walter Lynwood Fleming, Louisiana State
University). Volume XIII, Index and Reading Courses
(edited by J. Walker McSpadden) was added in 1913.
Volumes VII and VIII are of particular interest to
students of southern literature. Volume VII includes es-
says about southern poetry and literary humor. Vol-
ume VIII contains an essay by Edwin Mims discussing

the main tendencies in southern literature, followed by
selections from eighteen southern writers chosen by
Mims to be featured in the volume.
Susan H. Irons
See also Anthologies of Southern Literature.
SOUTHWEST
Similarities between the Southwest (New Mexico, Ari-
zona, West Texas, southern Utah, portions of Colorado
adjacent to the Rio Grande) and the Old Southwest
(middle Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, northern Loui-
siana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas) are minimal,
sharing little more than a word, though the two desig-
nations may cause some confusion. Not only does the
Southwest have a geography and climate markedly un-
like that of the Old Southwest, the Southwest has a
much older history. Indeed, it contains many of the
oldest communities and cultures in what is now the
United States of America. Though the states that com-
prise the Southwest are among the most newly admit-
ted to the Union, Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico,
was founded in 1609 (only St. Augustine, Florida, pre-
dates it). Santa Fe is the oldest continuous seat of gov-
ernment in the United States. Whereas the cultural
links of the Old Southwest connect most strongly to
those of England (transformed often in the older settle-
ments of the Upper South), the cultural links of the
Southwest to Europe come by way of El Camino Real
from Mexico City. Later, the Old Santa Fe Trail
brought traders from the North and settlers from the
Midwest. Spanish culture increasingly received infu-
sion of Anglo culture, but not in any major way south-
ern culture. Native American presence is strong in the
states of New Mexico and Arizona, and a visitor to
those states and southern Colorado will find ruins from
the ancient Anasazi that greatly predate any European
presence. In contrast, Native Americans have long been
displaced from the lands of the Old Southwest, as
Faulkner chronicles in Go Down, Moses (1942). The
term Old Southwest survives primarily because of its
usefulness in describing Southwestern humor.
The Confederacy wished to claim the Southwest as
its own (though its western aridity made the Southwest
unfit for the cotton economy of the South) and ex-
tended its western front as far as Albuquerque (which
Southwest / 843
it held for two months in 1862) and Santa Fe (the Con-
federate flag flew for a short time over the governor's
palace), but its ascendance was brief, its retreat from
the Southwest prompt. Following the war, southerners
were participants in the westward course of the nation,
and defenders of the Lost Cause sometimes played a
part in frontier violence. The stereotype of the proud
but foolish southerner developed. George Stevens used
it in his classic western film Shane (1953). Walter Van
Tilburg Clark explored the darker side of the postwar
southerner come west in his depiction of Major Tetley
in the classic novel The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), later
a major film (1943).
In the twentieth century, many writers and artists
have journeyed to the Southwest-attracted by the
beauty of the land, the cultural diversity, and a long
history; many have stayed. Among the present genera-
tion of writers who have claimed the Southwest, Bar-
bara Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky, but she
moved as a young woman to Arizona and set her
highly acclaimed early novels in the Southwest: The
Bean Trees (1988), Animal Dreams (1990), and Pigs in
Heaven (1988). Nevertheless, Kingsolver now lives
part of each year in southern Appalachia, and her
southern roots inform her work, noticeably in The Poi-
sonwood Bible (1998), which depicts Southern Baptist
missionaries in the Congo. Willa Cather, born in Vir-
ginia and shaped by southern parents, discovered the
Southwest after she had written her important fiction
set in Nebraska. Many have claimed Death Comes for
the Archbishop (1927), her novel about the missions of
New Mexico, her best book. Following his battles with
tuberculosis, Walker Percy turned to the desert air of
New Mexico in his effort to find physical and spiritual
health, a progress mirrored in the migrations of Will
Barrett in The Last Gentleman (1967). North Caroli-
na's Doris Betts has set two novels in the Southwest-
Heading West (1981) and The Sharp Teeth of Love
(1997). Whereas Betts's novels are contemporary,
Clyde Edgerton's Redeye: A Western (1995) is set in
the nineteenth century; in Redeye, a young southern
woman journeys to the West-as happens in both of
Betts's novels. Cormac McCarthy set his first novels in
the hills and mountains of East Tennessee. The Or-
chard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of
God (1974), and Suttree (1979) earned McCarthy
fame as an inheritor of Faulknerian gothic tradition.
But McCarthy left Tennessee, eventually, for El Paso,
Texas-a turning marked in Blood Meridian, or the
Evening Redness in the West (1985). McCarthy is now
 844 / Southwest
counted a major western writer, especially for his por-
trayal of John Grady Cole, last of a long line of Texas
ranchers in his Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses
(1972), The Crossing (1995), and Cities of the Plain
(1998).
Although novels being written in the Southwest-
with major attention to Native American and Hispanic
cultures and heightened treatment of the land and envi-
ronment-are distinct from much southern writing,
linkages will likely increase, especially as Hispanic
presence in the South increases.
Joseph M. Flora
See also Old Southwest; Southwestern Humor.
David King Dunaway, Writing the Southwest (1995).
SOUTHWESTERN HUMOR
Southwestern humor (also known as "frontier humor,"
"antebellum humor," and "backwoods humor") was a
genre that flourished in the three decades leading up to
the Civil War. Although influenced by several sources,
including William Byrd's History of the Dividing Line,
the satiric sketches of Addison and Steele, and the
Down East humor that flourished in New England,
Southwestern humorists introduced to the nation a
new landscape of colorful backwoodsmen, shifty con-
fidence men, and urbane gentlemen, all of whom spoke
in accents unlike any that had been heard in earlier
American literature.
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes:
Characters, Incidents, &c., in the First Half Century of
the Republic (1835) is usually considered to be the first genre, Major Jones's Courtship is also anomalous in
major work of Southwestern humor. Consisting of
nineteen sketches, many of which had appeared pre-
viously in the Milledgeville (Georgia) Southern Re-
corder and the Augusta State Rights' Sentinel, Georgia
Scenes is a complex portrayal of a culture in transition
from frontier to settlement. Because Longstreet's color-
ful descriptions of horse swaps, dances, fights, gander
pullings, horse races, and shooting matches made the
work a popular success-Harper's brought out a sec-
ond edition in 1840 and the work was regularly re-
printed for the rest of the century-more discriminat-
ing critics recognized its literary value; in an 1836
review published in the Southern Literary Messenger,
Edgar Allan Poe called it "a sure omen of better days
of the literature of the South."
Georgia Scenes introduced at a high level of devel-
opment many of the features that would come to define
the genre: an emphasis on documentary realism, a col-
orful depiction of the rough-and-tumble contests and
social rituals of a frontier society, and a narrative frame
in which a literate gentleman narrates his encounters
with lower-class, dialect-speaking characters. Georgia
Scenes has as good a claim as any work of southern lit-
erature to being the first substantial treatment of the
class that came to be known as "plain folk."
Like many of his fellow humorists, Longstreet was
ambivalent about his role as an author. For a few years
after the publication of Georgia Scenes, he continued
to publish, mostly in Simms's Magnolia, the sketches
that were later collected by his nephew Fitz R. Long-
street in Stories with a Moral (1912). His work as a
Methodist minister and educator caused him, however,
to downplay his literary efforts as the frivolous
"amusement of my idle hours." Nevertheless, Long-
street's influence was significant, and for many years
reviewers almost inevitably compared new works of
humor with Georgia Scenes. In addition to titling his
work Mississippi Scenes, Joseph Beckham Cobb dedi-
cated to Longstreet his 1851 collection of sketches,
which are indebted to Georgia Scenes in both tech-
nique and subject matter.
Another writer influenced by Longstreet was his
close friend and protege William Tappan Thompson.
In 1843, Thompson published Major Jones's Court-
ship, an epistolary novel recounting the courtship and
marriage of the title character to Miss Mary Stallions,
the college-educated daughter of a local planter.
Mostly lacking in the earthy comedy common to the
being narrated in dialect by a yeoman farmer. Al-
though Major Jones is sensible and good-hearted, his
nai'vete provides much of the book's humor. A memo-
rable trip to the "opery" recounted in a subsequent
volume, Major ]ones's Sketches of Travel (1848), pro-
duces a baffled spectator and a greatly misunderstood
musical form. The rube's misadventures in town
proved to be a fertile subject for many humorists, in-
cluding John S. Robb, whose "Swallowing an Oyster
Alive" provides a typical variation on the theme. In this
sketch, a "hero from the Sucker state" consumes his
first oyster, and after being informed that a live oyster
is likely to eat through his "innards," is luckily able to

quell the threat with a liberal dose of strong pepper
sauce.
The late 1830s saw Southwestern humor taking
shape in two important places: the Crockett almanacs,
published between 1834 and 1856, and the New York-
based Spirit of the Times. Colonel David Crockett had
already appeared, indirectly at any rate, in James Kirke
Paulding's The Lion of the West, an 1830 play whose
protagonist, Nimrod Wildfire, bore more than a pass-
ing resemblance to the Tennessee congressman. Al-
though Crockett's backwoods autobiography had ap-
peared in 1834, his death at the Alamo in 1836 left him
free to inhabit a more fully mythologized landscape as
the archetypal frontier hero. If the Crockett of 1834
was a capable backwoodsman, he could not yet un-
freeze the sun with hot bear grease, a feat performed
with little difficulty by his 1854 incarnation. As Ben
Franklin had done a century earlier, the various au-
thors of the Crockett almanacs embellished a prag-
matic agricultural document with a persona fit for the
times, and in so doing, played a key role in translating
into printed form the oral tradition of the tall tale that
flourished on the frontier.
A similar mythology of Southwestern humor arose
around the legendary flatboatman Mike Fink, the most
famous of the ring-tailed roarers whose brags and
fights became staples of the genre. Hunters, as well, are
frequently numbered among the half-horse, half-alliga-
tors that provide many of the genre's most colorful mo-
ments. Even writers such as Longstreet concerned to
document a specific locale were likely to include a few
"stretchers" for comic effect, and a tension between re-
alism and wild exaggeration pervades the work of
many humorists. Exaggeration and outright lying take
place within sketches as well, and on more than one oc-
casion discord arises when an audience member ac-
cuses a story of "smelling rather tall." "Rance Bore-
'em," a character in Francis James Robinson's Kups of
Kauphy (1853), is an especially gifted liar capable of
fabricating, in response to any topic raised in conversa-
tion, a heroic tale involving his exploits in Texas. In
one story, Rance recounts how, without any medical
training, he once replaced a man's diseased bones with
two he had fashioned from a white oak. As the charac-
ter of Rance Bore-'em suggests, the backwoods incar-
nation of the alazon or braggart makes many appear-
ances. One of the most memorable is William C. Hall's
Mike Hooter, a character based (not atypically) on an
actual person. In "How Mike Hooter Came Very Near
'Wolloping' Arch Coony," Hooter shows unequivo-
Southwestern Humor / 845
cally that, although his insults and brags are second to
none, he is profoundly reluctant to come to blows.
Like several of his peers, Hall never published a
book-length work. Although most of the best humor-
ists eventually did so, Southwestern humor was rarely
conceived in book form. To be sure, some of the best
works in the genre are structured as books and not
merely as collections of sketches, but it is arguable that
the more important format for the genre consists of the
newspapers and journals in which the vast majority of
sketches and tales were originally published. Several
newspapers, including the St. Louis Reveille, the Con-
cordia (Louisiana) Intelligencer, and two papers based
in New Orleans, the Delta and the Picayune, served as
important outlets for humorous writing. Because it was
common practice for many of these journals to reprint
sketches published in others, the dissemination of pop-
ular sketches was wide indeed, and the public's appe-
tite for the best of them was strong.
By far the most important and influential journal
was William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times. Porter
began the Spirit of Times as a sporting journal that ca-
tered to upper-class hunters, fishermen, and especially
horsemen. With only a small staff, Porter was forced to
search for amateur correspondents if he wanted to ob-
tain timely reports on racing throughout the land. By
the end of the 1830s, several of these correspondents
began to try their hands at more literary efforts. These
usually derived from a sporting event such as a horse
race or a hunting expedition, but as time passed, more
of them began to include the tall-tale exaggerations
and frontier realism that would make the Spirit one of
the most important journals in the history of American
humor. Publication in the Spirit marked the beginning
of many careers, including those of Thomas Bangs
Thorpe, Johnson Jones Hooper, Alexander McNutt,
Henry Clay Lewis, and George Washington Harris.
Virtually none of these men was a professional author,
and most, fearing that authorship would subvert their
careers as ministers, planters, lawyers, journalists, and
politicians, preferred to publish anonymously or under
pseudonyms. Such authors included McNutt (The Tur-
key Runner), Phillip B. January (Obe Oilstone), John S.
Robb (Solitaire), George P. Burnham (The Young 'Un),
and the Field brothers, Joseph and Matthew (Everpoint
and Phazma, respectively).
Porter also played a role in determining the political
orientation of Southwestern humor. Eager to gain a
wide national readership, he banned political discus-
sions from the Spirit, although a few writers did man-
 846 / Southwestern Humor
age to sneak in humorous sketches with political over-
tones. Many humorists were politically active, and
most were centrist Whigs eager to reach consensus
with men across the nation whom they considered to
be their social peers. The apolitical tone of the Spirit
helps partially to explain why the issue of slavery plays
such a negligible role in humorous writing. The rela-
tively few African American characters that do appear
tend to be firmly in the background.
One of Porter's earliest and most influential corre-
spondents was Charles F. M. Noland, a planter and
journalist from northern Arkansas, who began to send
letters to the Spirit in 1836 signed "N. of Arkansas."
As "N. of Arkansas," Noland usually contributed
sporting epistles of the kind that would continue to be
associated with Southwestern humor, if not actually
part of it; later examples would include William El-
liott's distinguished Carolina Sports (1846) and John-
son Jones Hooper's Dog and Gun: A Few Loose Chap-
ters on Shooting (1856). By 1837, Noland had
established the persona of "Pete Whetstone," who
would act as the ostensible author of forty-five of the
over two hundred letters that Noland eventually con-
tributed to the Spirit. Although, like Major Jones after
him, Pete narrates his stories in dialect, his frontier
community is an altogether rougher place than Major
Jones's comparatively tranquil plantation. At Devil's
Fork, frolics, fun, and fights (often involving the pugi-
listically inclined Dan Looney) predominate. If Noland
never progressed beyond the level of amusing anec-
dote, he would nevertheless remain one of the Spirit's
most prolific and entertaining correspondents.
Another frequent correspondent, Thomas Bangs
Thorpe, would achieve artistic distinction. A north-
erner by birth, Thorpe moved to Louisiana in 1837 and
would remain there as a painter, journalist, postmaster,
and politician for the next two decades. In 1839 he sent
to the Spirit a sketch entitled "Tom Owen, the Bee-
Hunter," a mock-heroic, quasi-mystical treatment of
the title character. The wildly popular sketch provided
Thorpe with both fame and a pseudonym, and "The
Bee Hunter" continued to publish regularly in the
Spirit. Most of the work for which Thorpe is remem-
bered is collected in two works, The Mysteries of the
Backwoods (1846) and The Hive of the Bee-Hunter
(1854). He also published a novel, The Master's House
(1854), and three works on military themes: Our Army
on the Rio Grande (1846), Our Army at Monterey
(1847), and The Zachary Taylor Anecdote Book
(1848). Like sporting literature, serious military litera-
ture retained an association with humorous writing,
with the Mexican War and its attendant political wran-
gling an especially prominent subject. Military and po-
litical exploits provided a rich supply of material for
humorous writing as well.
Like many of his peers, Thorpe was capable of
broad comedy. In "A Piano in Arkansas," the back-
woods village of Hardscrabble receives a report that a
piano has been brought to town by a new family. Since
none of the villagers has even seen a piano, speculation
abounds as to its nature. Mo Mercer, the self-pro-
claimed "oracle of the village" who brags of "visiting
the 'Capitol' twice, and 'seeing Pianos as plenty as
woodchucks,' " mistakenly identifies, to his chagrin
and the townspeople's delight, what turns out to be a
"yankee washing machine." Humor was not, however,
Thorpe's primary theme; most of the sketches in The
Mysteries of the Backwoods and The Hive of the Bee-
Hunter exemplify sporting literature more than hu-
morous writing per se.
Where Thorpe truly distinguished himself was in ar-
ticulating the elegiac tone that many lesser writers only
suggested. Like Tom Owen, many of Thorpe's most
memorable characters are in the process of being dis-
possessed by the forces of history. "As a country be-
comes cleared up and settled," Thorpe writes in the
first sentence of his that would ever see print, "Bee-
hunters disappear; consequently they are seldom or
ever noticed." A later sketch entitled "The Disgraced
Scalp Lock" involves two figures on the losing side of
history: Mike Fink, whose exploits as the archetypal
flatboatman have been rendered anachronistic by the
encroachment of civilization, and Proud Joe, a drunken
Indian who reasserts his dignity in revenging an insult.
Thorpe's greatest elegy is, of course, "The Big Bear of
Arkansas," which would become the single most fa-
mous and influential story in the tradition of South-
western humor. The tale's protagonist, Jim Doggett,
enacts in microcosm the transformation of the frontier
hero; although he first appears as a half-horse, half-alli-
gator, he becomes humanized as he relates his encoun-
ters with "the Bar." Like Faulkner's Old Ben a century
later, the "unhuntable bear ... died when his time
come," and his passing signifies the passing of the wil-
derness; like Sam Fathers in Faulkner's story, Jim's life
as one of the "children of the wood" is diminished by
the bear's death.
Two important collections of humor grew out of the
Spirit. The Big Bear of Arkansas (1845), which seems
to have been suggested to Porter by the publishing

house of Carey and Hart, included, in addition to
Thorpe's title story, twenty sketches, all of which are
set in the South. A Quarter Race in Kentucky, a second
volume published a year later, included several sketches
by northern and midwestern writers, indicating that if
the best humorists of the day hailed from the South,
writers in other parts of the country were using similar
forms with their own local materials. Porter published
a wide variety of humor in the Spirit, and in selecting
the sketches for these collections, he began defining the
canon of Southwestern humor. The success of these
two anthologies led to the publication of several oth-
ers, notably T. A. Burke's Polly Peablossom's Wedding
(1851) and S. P. Avery's The Harp of a Thousand
Strings (1858). Whether anthology or single-author
book, virtually all major works of Southwestern
humor were published by northern presses, and north-
ern readers provided a substantial portion of the
books' market.
Although certain themes and techniques recur
throughout the genre, the heterogeneity of Southwest-
ern humor has frequently been underestimated. In ad-
dition to simple anecdotes, Southwestern humor is in-
debted to numerous other literary forms, including
Juvenalian and Addisonian satire, the sketch, the essay,
the epistolary novel, the picaresque novel, and the
travel narrative. The form of individual works differs
in sometimes drastic ways. Johnson Jones Hooper's
Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the
Tallapoosa Volunteers (1845) is a brilliant parody of
the campaign biography, a genre that dominated politi-
cal life in the nineteenth century. Hardin Taliaferro's
Fisher's River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters
(1859) appears, to modern eyes, like a collection of
folklore whose author has taken great pains to recreate
the social context of the tall tales. Sol Smith, a gifted
storyteller and legendary manager of a traveling the-
ater company, divided his Theatrical Management in
the West and South (1868) into five "acts" to suggest a
play.
Joseph Glover Baldwin's Flush Times in Alabama
and Mississippi: A Collection of Sketches (1853) is per-
haps the most heterogeneous single work of South-
western humor. Combining humorous pseudo-bio-
graphical sketches, historical essays, short anecdotes,
and serious biographical essays on leading Whig politi-
cians, Flush Times documents the fitful and often futile
attempts of lawyers and, to a lesser extent, politicians
to impose order upon a chaotic frontier. Baldwin's bril-
liant rendering of a wide variety of dialects, ranging
Southwestern Humor / 84 7
from the patrician speech of his narrator to Burwell
Shines, whose impossibly pedantic language "rendered
burlesque impossible," to a host of lower-class charac-
ters "as corrupt in language as in morals," only adds
to his description of the "riotous carnival" of the Old
Southwest, where traditional modes of social organiza-
tion and authority no longer hold sway. In particular,
a historical essay entitled "How Time Served the Vir-
ginians" shows how the cultured inhabitants of the
"land of orators, heroes and statesmen" succumb to a
world dominated by credit, speculation, and "sharp
financiering." Flush Times is also notable for its em-
phasis on bodily humor. Cave Burton, a man " 'consid-
erable' in all animal appetites," "as good in liquids as
in solids," joins Squire A., a man of "distinguished rep-
utation and immense skill in the art and mystery of frit-
ter eating," as one of the work's most memorable char-
acters.
In the unrefined world of Southwestern humor, life
is often shown as a physical process of appetite and
survival. In a representative story, a poor white in Rob-
inson's Kups of Kauphy lies near death after eating two
pecks of cherries until he is relieved by a heavy dose of
calomel. No work shows the emphasis on the body and
bodily humor more than Henry Clay Lewis's Odd
Leaves in the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor
(1850). Lewis's work as a physician in Madison Parish,
Louisiana, provided him with substantial background
material for developing the swamp-doctor persona of
"Madison Tensas" that he used in his stories. Lewis
first saw print with "Cupping on the Sternum," which
appeared in the Spirit in 1845. The popular and widely
reprinted sketch, later incorporated into Odd Leaves,
turns on the novice physician's mistaken equation of
"sternum" and "stern"-a likely mistake for a young
man who had spent substantial time on riverboats.
Here, as in "Love in the Garden," a story of how intes-
tinal irregularities interrupt a nervous courtship, the
comedy is lighthearted, but elsewhere Lewis's humor
of the body carries grotesque and even gothic over-
tones. In "Stealing a Baby," the swamp doctor's love
affair ends when the stolen corpse of a baby falls from
his cloak at an inopportune moment; in "The Curious
Widow," he attempts (unsuccessfully) to scare a prying
landlady with the skin of a face peeled from a hideous
albino cadaver; and in "A Struggle for Life," a drunken
African American dwarf chokes the swamp doctor into
unconsciousness before burning to death in a campfire.
Although Lewis's emphasis on disease, decay, and
 848 I Southwestern Humor
death is extreme, these themes appear frequently in the
work of other humorists.
If not grotesque, the fictional world of Johnson
Jones Hooper is certainly sordid. Like Baldwin, he saw
firsthand the flush times of the Alabama frontier, where
he worked as a journalist and later as a political ap-
pointee. Although he later published a volume entitled
The Widow Rigby's Husband (1851), his fame was as-
sured by Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs.
Hooper-who, like Longstreet, later came to regret his
humorous writing-adopted the older writer's framing
device with a twist: throughout the work, the literate
narrator maintains the pretense of admiring his shady
protagonist, whom he is recommending for political
office. Hooper cleverly masks satire as approbation;
even Suggs's shadier exploits are dismissed as mere foi-
bles.
Hooper's greatest achievement is, however, Suggs
himself. Like Baldwin's Ovid Bolus, a notorious liar
uniquely suited to the chaos of the "flush times," Suggs
repeatedly demonstrates the efficacy of living by the
maxim "it is good to be shifty in a new country." In
one episode, he pockets $170 from a land speculator
whose conversation he has overheard; in another, he
takes advantage of the distant Creek Wars to achieve
the lofty and personally advantageous position of cap-
tain of the Tallapoosa Volunteers. Suggs's shiftiness
makes him the archetypal poor-white confidence man
a century before his literary descendant Flem Snopes.
Nevertheless, there is some justice in his deceptions
since his victims typically include the sanctimonious,
the greedy, the gullible, and the proud. In a scene that
Mark Twain would later rework in Huckleberry Finn,
Suggs steals the stage from a venal evangelist by faking
a memorable conversion complete with visions of dia-
bolical alligators; in the end, he makes off with a hefty by looking "roun for sum wun tu vent rath on." Spying
collection to begin his own church. Despite his utter
amorality, Suggs nevertheless serves a positive role as
trickster.
The genre's greatest trickster would not, however,
appear until a decade later, when George Washington
Harris, a native Pennsylvanian who had grown up in
Knoxville, Tennessee, began publishing tales about a
character named Sut Lovingood. These would not be
collected in book form until 1867, when Sut Lovin-
good: Yarns Spun by a "Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool,"
usually considered to be the final work of Southwest-
ern humor, was published. If Suggs's world is seedy,
Sut's is positively nihilistic. In "Sut Lovingood's Ser-
mon," he enumerates the five "strong pints" of his
"karacter," beginning with his ownership of a "whisky
proof gizzard" in place of a soul, and ending with his
ability to evade "misfortnit skeery scrapes" faster than
anybody.
Following in the footsteps of many earlier charac-
ters, Sut is a coward, but he makes no pretense of brav-
ery. Concerned only with survival, he advertises his
cowardice and views heroism in any form as sheer non-
sense. Told of Ajax "darin the litenin," he responds
that "eny fool mout know the litenin wudn't mine him
no more nur a locomotum wud mine a tumble-bug.
An' then, spose hit hed met his dar, why durn me ef
thar'd been a scrumshun ove 'im lef big enuf tu bait a
minner hook wif." Although at times almost unreada-
ble and, according to some critics, unrelated to any
known dialect, Sut's speech serves as felicitous vehicle
for the narration of his adventures.
Those adventures usually involve Sut taking re-
venge-often with the aid of livestock and hornets, his
signature tools-on various people who have gotten on
his bad side. Usually there is some logic to Sut's selec-
tion of victims. He delights in the degradation of his
father, who on more than one occasion is reduced to
the status of an animal; Parson John Bullen, a hypocrit-
ical bully who uses Sut as a moral object lesson; Sicily
Burns, a comely lass who throws him over for a circuit
rider; and most characters who represent authority and
"civilization" generally. Along with his fellow scourge
Simon Suggs, Sut Lovingood stands at the pinnacle of
Southwestern humor's satiric strain.
Yet unlike Suggs, Sut shows little interest in money
or self-advancement. His universe is essentially absurd,
and his reaction is to strike out at it. On several occa-
sions, he selects his victims arbitrarily. In "Sut Lovin-
good's Dog," Sut responds to a fracas involving his dog
an innocent bystander who'll "do tu put it on eny-
how," Sut punches the man, bites him "wher yer foot
itches to go when yu are in kickin distance ove a fop,"
and places in his coattail a burning match that ignites
a packet of gunpowder. The image of his hurt and be-
wildered antagonist haunts Sut, who calls it "the ung-
liest, scuriest, an' savidgest site I ever seed." Yet Sut's
wrath is not yet fully vented; he announces to a nearby
group that the man is a murderer with a large reward
on his head, and watches him run out of sight with a
mob "openin on his trail like a pack ove houns." The
victim of a cosmic bad joke, Sut takes revenge and
spreads misery where he can.
Sut's attitudes toward women exaggerate a misogy-

mst1c tendency found throughout Southwestern
humor. Sut views Sicily Burns solely as a physical ob-
ject, reducing her in a memorable backwoods blason to
a collection of sexual characteristics: "Sich a buzzim!
Jis' think ove two snow balls wif a strawberry stuck
but-ainded intu bof on em." The social role of women
as purveyors of order, security, and respectability is, for
Sut, anathema; it is no coincidence that the archetypal
female rite of Mrs. Yardley's quilting receives one of
his signature visits. As a man of sensual appetite, the
idea of marriage is as foreign to him as it would be to
his dog.
Throughout Southwestern humor, civilization itself
carries a feminine connotation opposed to the mascu-
line world of the hunt, the horse swap, and the frontier.
Two recurring character types further suggest the
alignment of civilization, especially in its negative
form, and femininity: the "charming creature" (Long-
street's name for the overly refined, socially destructive
woman) and the dandy, the feminized upper-class male
whose "city airs" make him the butt of many a prank.
Although occasionally, as in Major Jones's Courtship
and William Gilmore Simms's "How Sharp Snaffles
Got His Capital and His Wife" (1870), the tension be-
tween the masculine world of hunting and camaraderie
and the feminine world of marriage and family is re-
solved satisfactorily, the more common relationship is
one of sustained opposition; to be a good fellow and a
good husband is a rare feat indeed. Southwestern
humor is, in sum, a genre dominated by the masculine
homosocial bond.
The recurring theme of failed courtship further
demonstrates this tendency. Usually narrated to a
group of men, the courtship tale often involves a male
protagonist whose attainment of a sexually desirable
woman is prevented by a rival, a hostile father, a series
of comic misadventures, or some combination thereof,
and often concludes with the protagonist "lighting out
for the territories" in one form or another. John S.
Robb's Streaks of Squatter Life, and Far-West Scenes
(1847) provides several variations on this form, the
most notable of which is a sketch entitled "Nettle Bot-
tom Ball." In this tale, a western miner named Jim
Sikes recounts to the "boys" how he came to flee from
Nettle Bottom, Illinois. Fearing that the citified clerks
are attracting all the available women, including the
narrator's sweetheart Betsy Jones, the boys of Nettle
Bottom decide to hold a ball where they can "jest out-
shine the town chaps" before they "tare the hide and
feathers off on em!" Unfortunately, when Jim goes to
Southwestern Humor / 849
pick up Betsy, she falls through a flimsy ceiling and
lands naked in a plate of mush. His luck does not im-
prove when he flees the house and attends the party,
where his buckskin trousers, wetted in the fracas, begin
to "shrink up an inch a minute." Humiliated and fear-
ful of Betsy's father, he flees civilization until he crosses
the "old Massissippi."
As the setting of "Nettle Bottom Ball" suggests,
"Southwestern humor" is, strictly speaking, a misno-
mer. Although many of the major figures were associ-
ated with Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, Robb
and other contributors to the Reveille frequently wrote
of the West, whereas eastern writers such as Longstreet
and Thompson had little contact with the Southwest
proper. What is fairly consistent in the genre is the
presence of a frontier conceived as a boundary between
nature and civilization. In many cases, the frontier
marks not so much a boundary between East and West
as between settled towns and the surrounding country-
side; in other instances, the frontier is personified in the
interaction between characters associated with civiliza-
tion and nature. In the latter scenario, the issue of class
typically emerges, since the character associated with
nature usually lies outside, or stands opposed, to the
kind of status afforded by social class. Indeed, many
writers found a rich theme in the tension between sta-
ble, conservative, aristocratic class structures associ-
ated with civilization and the fluid, individualistic,
meritocratic concept of status that predominated on
the frontier. This interaction produced a basic set of
character types through which the positive and nega-
tive aspects of society and nature are encoded. Insofar
as the upper class is concerned, two basic types emerge:
the gentleman, who wears his authority with grace,
and the dandy, whose effete snobbery makes him a so-
cial threat. In addition to the frontiersman proper, who
stands almost entirely outside of society, the lower
class is represented by the poor white, whose contemp-
tuous resentment of the upper class is linked with a
barbaric temperament, and the yeoman or plain white,
who recognizes the gentleman's authority but retains
his pride and natural virtue.
Since virtually all of these authors came from the
upper class, it is not surprising that most communicate
implicitly what Taliaferro, in a sketch entitled "Larkin
Snow, the Miller" stated outright: that "a man will fill
the station for which he was designed by the Sovereign
Master Overseer of mankind." Although the prohibi-
tion against class mobility remains largely intact, many
works represent interclass relationships as cohesive
 850 / Southwestern Humor
and organic. In Alexander McNutt's stories, for exam-
ple, the colorful hunters and yarn-spinners Jem and
Chunkey work for a wealthy planter they call "Capt-
ing," but there is no evidence of either condescension
on the one hand or resentment on the other. The same
can be said of the relationship between Jim Doggett
and the upper-class narrator of "The Big Bear of Ar-
kansas." William Gilmore Simms's "Sharp Snaffles"
goes one step further, as the literate narrator comes to
understand that on the hunting expedition that he and
his peers have funded, it is the backwoodsmen who
control the situation "sixty miles beyond what the con-
ceited world calls 'civilization.' "Although several gen-
tleman narrators do view the lower class with amused
and sometimes contemptuous condescension, the more
common relationship is one of camaraderie and mutual
respect. For its complex representation of social class,
Southwestern humor remains an important resource
for the study of antebellum southern culture.
The more important legacy of Southwestern humor
is, of course, literary. Although often viewed by mod-
ern critics, somewhat anachronistically, as lowbrow,
subliterary writing, Southwestern humor was recog-
nized in its own time as a significant contribution to
American letters. In an age of literary nationalism, crit-
ics attached few pejorative connotations to humor, and
when Porter prefaced The Big Bear of Arkansas by
claiming that a "new vein of literature, as original as it
is inexhaustible in its source, has been opened in this
country," he, like Poe in his review of Georgia Scenes,
was not using the word literature as casually as many
later critics have suggested. In retrospect, Porter's
claim appears as something more than mere puffery.
Two of America's greatest writers, Mark Twain and
William Faulkner, show an immense debt to the genre,
and Sut Lovingood is the ancestor of any number of
characters in the work of Erskine Caldwell, Flannery
O'Connor, Harry Crews, and others. In addition,
Southwestern humor played a significant role in the de-
velopment of literary realism and the short-story form
in America. Perhaps most important, antebellum hu-
morists were among the first authors to mine the rich
vein of vernacular literature that would remain a dis-
tinctive and integral part of American and southern
writing.
Scott Romine
See also Arkansas, Literature of; Tall Tale.
John Q. Anderson, ed., Louisiana Swamp Doctor {1962); Wal-
ter Blair, Native American Humor, 1800-1900 {1937); Car-
olyn S. Brown, The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Litera-
ture (1987); Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham, eds.,
Humor of the Old Southwest (3rd ed.; 1994); Nancy Snell
Griffith, Humor of the Old Southwest: A Selected Annotated
Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (1992);
M. Thomas Inge, The Frontier Humorists: Critical Views
(1975); Kimball King, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1984);
William E. Lenz, Fast Talk & Flush Times: The Confidence
Man as Literary Convention {1985); Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark
Twain and Southwestern Humor {1959); Shields Mcllwaine,
The Southern Poor White, from Lubber/and to Tobacco Road
(1939); Milton Rickels, George Washington Harris {1965),
Thomas Bangs Thorpe (1962); Constance Rourke, American
Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931); James At-
kins Shackleford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend
(1956); Merrill Maguire Skaggs, The Folk in Southern Fiction
(1972); John Donald Wade, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet
(1924); Norris Yates, William T. Porter and the "Spirit of the
Times" (1957).
SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
The Spanish-American War in the spring and summer
of 1898 served to put the United States of America on
the world map of major powers for the first time and
also to join soldiers from both North and South in a
common military cause and under one flag, thirty-three
years after Appomattox.
Toward the end of The Leopard's Spots (1902),
Thomas Dixon noted with patriotic fervor the union of
North and South in battle: "Then came the trumpet
call that put the South to the test of fire and blood. The
world waked next morning to find for the first time in
our history the dream of union a living fact. There was
no North, no South-but from the James to the Rio
Grande the children of the Confederacy rushed with
eager, flushed faces to defend the flag their fathers had
once fought." Although Dixon's commentary on his-
tory is reasonably apt, his vitriolic racism and aggres-
sive white supremacy notions, which impel the narra-
tive at almost every turn, figure prominently in the
novel's harsh characterization of African American
volunteers in the war.
African American writers from the South cast quite
another light on the war. For example, James Weldon
Johnson, in "The Color Sergeant-On an Incident at
the Battle of San Juan Hill," both celebrated the hero-
ism of a black soldier and lamented the way the sol-
dier's valor was discounted because of his color. A
North Carolina African American writer, James Mc-
Girt, developed a comparable pattern in his story "In
Love as in War," from The Triumphs of Ephraim

(1907). McGirt's protagonist, Sergeant Roberts,
achieves glory in battle at San Juan Hill, but later, in
the Philippines, runs afoul of a white southern officer
who uses the advantage of rank to try, albeit unsuccess-
fully, to best Roberts in an affair of the heart. Sutton E.
Griggs, an African American novelist from Texas, in
The Unfettered (1902) focused on the postwar situa-
tion in the Philippines, with Dorian Warthell decrying
imperialist action and achieving more freedom for him-
self as a result.
Because of the large-scale operation aimed at Cuba,
the South served as a major staging ground for war ac-
tivity against Spain. Journalists from all over the coun-
try flocked to Florida. The South was in the national
spotlight, and southerners relished both the goals of
the Cuban expedition and the attention it brought to
their region. In 1898, Moses Koenigsberg, a Texas
journalist who served briefly with the First Division of
the Seventh Army Corps in Miami, produced Southern
Martyrs, which detailed the experiences of Alabama
white regiments in the war.
From the perspective of both distance and time,
however, Mark Twain drew sharply critical conclu-
sions about the Spanish-American War. In a series of
short pieces-"A Salutation-Speech from the Nine-
teenth Century to the Twentieth, Taken Down in
Short-Hand by Mark Twain" (1900), "To the Person
Sitting in Darkness" (1901), "Battle Hymn of the Re-
public (Brought Down to Date)" (1901), "As Regards
Patriotism" (1901), and even "The War Prayer"
(1905)-Twain wrote with acerbic skepticism and dis-
may about the effects of the war, seeing the patriotic
flag-waving as a cynical cover for imperialism and
greed, most particularly evident in the American sup-
pression of insurrection by Philippine natives once they
had been liberated from Spanish control.
Owen W. Gilman Jr.
See also Racism; Twain, Mark.
James R. Payne, "Afro-American Literature of the Spanish-
American War," MELUS (Fall 1983).
SPEECH AND DIALECT
The South is the region of the United States most asso-
ciated with distinctive language patterns. Linguist Den-
nis Preston has shown in a number of studies charting
Speech and Dialect / 851
the dialect perceptions of both southerners and non-
southerners that the single perception that almost
everyone agrees on is that the South, however they con-
figure the region geographically, has a different way of
using the English language.
Southern ways of speaking are also the most scruti-
nized. The South is the only region in the United States
whose speech has inspired a scholarly, book-length an-
notated bibliography, already in a second expanded
edition, as well as two important volumes of essays re-
sulting from two major linguistic conferences focusing
on language variety in the South. The sounds, vocabu-
lary, and grammatical structures heard throughout the
vast region are mapped in detail in the records of two
enormous projects of linguistic geography, The Lin-
guistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States
(LAMSAS) and The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States
(LAGS). In the three volumes of The Dictionary of
American Regional English (DARE) that have ap-
peared thus far, the labels South and South Midland
are the most frequent regional designations.
Despite the widely held notion that there is a dis-
tinctive southern way of speaking, in fact there are
many southern ways of speaking. The South is actually
more diverse in speech than any other region of the
United States and contains within its wide geographic
sweep such noticeably different varieties of English as
those spoken by watermen of Tangier Island in Chesa-
peake Bay, African Americans in the Low Country of
South Carolina, small-scale farmers in Eastern Tennes-
see, upper-class speakers in Anniston, Alabama, urban-
ized young adults in Atlanta, Ninth-Warders in New
Orleans, and Cajuns in southern Louisiana and East
Texas.
On the basis of linguistic features correlated with
geography, the South has traditionally been divided
into at least two major dialect areas. The South Mid-
land area covers the Piedmont and mountains of the
Southern Appalachians; the Lowland South area runs
along the Atlantic Coast and across the Lower South to
Texas. But the linguistic atlas projects suggest that
these two major dialects include at least eleven subre-
gional varieties. In addition, geography is not the sole,
and perhaps not even the most significant, factor con-
tributing to the diversity of southern speech. Socioeco-
nomic status and race are both important, as is popula-
tion density. There may be as many as fourteen
different dialects associated with southern cities, and
rural versus urban has become an essential variable in
the study of southern speech.
 852 / Speech and Dialect
Despite the demonstrable linguistic differences
among dialects of English spoken in the South, some
features of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar
are sufficiently widespread or remarkable to be charac-
terized as representative of southern speech. Of course,
not all speakers of southern English exhibit all these
features, and many speakers of American English who
are not southern exhibit some of them.
Foremost, because of its pervasiveness as a stereo-
type, is the southern drawl. Popularly characterized as
slowness of tempo, nasality, elongation of vowels, or a
combination of these features, the southern drawl has
thus far eluded precise articulatory description. Lin-
guists do know, however, that slower overall speech
tempo is not a factor. Nor is the drawl a consequence
of hot weather or a sluggish pace of life.
Other features of pronunciation associated with
southern speech are easier to describe. Many southern-
ers, particularly African Americans, do not pro-
nounce Ir/ after vowels, as in the words hear, party, and
over. Attempts to represent the lack of /r/ in writing
often substitute the letter h, as in heah, pahty, and
ovah. But it is in vowels that southern dialects differ
most noticeably from other varieties of English, and
what is popularly called a drawl is probably due in part
to the pronunciation of vowels. In a large portion of
the South and for speakers of all socioeconomic ranks,
the high and mid-front, lax vowels /1/ and /el do not
contrast before nasal consonants. These speakers lack
the so-called pin/pen distinction, pronouncing both
members of the following pairs the way that the first is
pronounced in other parts of the United States: mint/
meant; since/cents; hymn/hem. When positioned before
nonnasal consonants, these lax vowels and others are
often followed by a second vowel sound, producing
pronunciations of words like bit, bet, and bat that are
often parodied as two syllables. Some southern dialects
also participate in a shift from /i/ to /el to /ay/. Thus teal
is pronounced the way that tale is pronounced in other
dialects, and tale is pronounced as tile. Likewise for
steel/stale/stile; kneel/nail/Nile; heat/hate/height; and
so forth. Furthermore, in some southern varieties, the
diphthong /ay/ loses its second component and be-
comes a monophthong (/a/), resulting in a lack of con-
trast between tide/Todd; tight/tot; time/Tom; and so
forth.
The diphthong /ay/ is subject to great dialect diver-
sity throughout the English-speaking world, and mon-
ophthongal /a/ is just one of its variants in the South.
Another is the stereotypical /oy/ pronunciation of the
Outer Banks of North Carolina, where the natives
proudly refer to themselves as "Hoi Toiders" (High
Tiders).
Dialects ordinarily develop a number of distinct
words and expressions or assign different meanings or
uses to already established words, and southern varie-
ties are no exception. North Carolinians, for example,
tote (carry) groceries home in a paper poke (bag) and
carry (transport) an ailing friend to the hospital. They
mash (press) buttons on appliances and use case (single
coin) quarters, dimes, and nickels to buy a coke (any
carbonated beverage) from a machine. They like salad
(turnip greens, collard greens, poke salad, and other
leafy vegetables) and threaten obstreperous children
with a hit upside the head. In North Carolina, people
who do not know how to dress or act appropriately are
tacky. This sprinkling of vernacular vocabulary cur-
rently used in one southern state overlaps only in part
with words and expressions used in other locales from
Maryland to Texas. The linguistic atlases and DARE
show that the region whose inhabitants consider them-
selves southerners is far from uniform in vocabulary.
Some variation tends to cluster according to the two
traditional divisions into South Midland and South,
sometimes called Upland and Lowland. Thus chigger is
generally used in the Highlands and Piedmont, and red
bug is the norm in the Lower South. Other terms, for
example chill bumps, are found scattered throughout
the South alongside the national goose bumps. Other
terms are quite local: meehonkey, a call used in the
game hide-and-seek, appears to be used only on Ocra-
coke Island, North Carolina; and neutral ground, a
grassy area in the middle of a street, is confined to New
Orleans and adjacent areas.
The hallmark of southern vocabulary is the second-
person pronoun y'all, sometimes you all, as in "I'd like
to get a picture of y'all in front of the house." Y'all is
heard throughout the South from speakers of all socio-
economic and educational levels. It is also the regional
marker most readily picked up by people moving into
the region from elsewhere. It is a versatile colloquial
form and is often used as a term of address, as in
"Y'all, come see this." It is also unselfconsciously used
in the possessive, as in "Is that y'all's new car?" Y'all is
not simply a regional substitute for you. It incorporates
connotations of friendliness, politeness, or inclusive-
ness lacking in the standard pronoun and suits south-
erners' self-image as hospitable people. A standard
farewell in all kinds of service settings from fast-food

restaurants to dry cleaners to upscale boutiques is
"Y'all come back."
Some typically southern grammatical constructions
allow speakers to add nuances of meanings to verbs.
Fixing to conveys an intention to begin the action of
the verb imminently, as in "I'm fixing to paint the wall
white and get new cabinets." Double modal auxilia-
ries, most commonly might could and may can, add a
degree of mental deliberation or tentativeness, as in
"We might could go to a movie tonight." Two gram-
matical constructions usually listed as characteristic of
the Appalachian region but also heard in other south-
ern varieties, though perhaps less frequently, are a-pre-
fixing and the done perfect. An initial unstressed sylla-
ble, usually spelled a-, is attached to the ing form of an
action verb in the verb phrase, as in "That youngster is
always a-whining about homework." The use of done
before the past form of a verb indicates completed ac-
tion, technically called perfect aspect, as in "You done
missed your turn."
Just as Americans from outside the South perceive
that southerners have a peculiar way of talking, so do
southerners themselves. They often are of two minds
about the way they talk. They are both attached to and
self-deprecating about their dialect. Because a southern
speech pattern evokes a complex stereotype, it serves as
a source of identity and pride on the one hand and anx-
iety and insecurity on the other. Although many south-
erners do not object to their dialect triggering images
of politeness, hospitality, and appreciation of heritage,
they do not care for their speech to stereotype them as
slow-witted, backward, or racist. Southern speech en-
joyed favorable national attention in the early 1990s
with the airing of Ken Burns's documentary The Civil
War. The erudition and eloquence of Shelby Foote's
commentary in his native Mississippi dialect confirmed
southerners' pride in their linguistic heritage.
Southerners value the sounds and the emotional res-
onances of their language, particularly in performance
settings. They admire storytellers, preachers, politi-
cians, and others who use the language with skill and
flair. Such privileging of the spoken word is in part a
consequence of the dominant type of religion in the re-
gion, in which God touches humans through the
names, proverbs, and stories of the Bible and also
through people who can expound on the Bible or can
testify in words to their personal experience of God.
The representation of colloquial language figures
prominently in much southern literature. The out-
standing example from the nineteenth century is Uncle
Speech and Dialect / 853
Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880) by Joel Chandler
Harris, which records the sounds, words, and gram-
matical structures of Middle Georgia tales brought
from Africa and preserved and developed orally by
slaves. Although Harris is generally judged a skillful
practitioner of literary dialect, the distortions in spell-
ing and frequent use of apostrophe marks to show pro-
nunciation sometimes strike contemporary readers as
caricature. Many current writers continue to be essen-
tially storytellers in the southern tradition, describing
in palpable detail settings, characters, and events au-
thentic to life in the South. They are no less concerned
than was Harris to create in readers' minds the flavor
and force of colloquial language. However, their strat-
egies are less blatant. Writers such as Eudora Welty,
Lee Smith, and Allan Gurganus capture the social sub-
tleties of southern language practices in, for example,
names and forms of address, politeness rituals, and
variations in conversational styles conditioned by race,
educational level, family status, and community expec-
tations. In a story without a single contrived spelling,
"A Hog Loves Its Life: Something About My Grand-
father" (White People, 1990), Gurganus gives a con-
temporary version of an elderly storyteller and a young
southern boy and the enduring power of the saying
"like Lancaster's mule." The story begins with the epi-
graph "Language, like love, starts local."
Local ways of speaking long nurtured in the South
are now being affected by changes in American society
such as increased mobility, mass education, and urban-
ization. There is some evidence that younger, upwardly
mobile speakers are adopting speech patterns different
from the traditional local ones of their parents. Yet
there is also evidence that, even as southern varieties
are changing, some features are becoming or remaining
distinct enough to serve as markers of southern iden-
tity.
Connie Eble
See also Accent; African American Vernacular English; Appala-
chia; Bible; Dialect Literature; Local Color; Preaching; Y'all.
Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally, and Robin Sabino, eds.,
Language Variety in the South Revisited (1997); Frederick G.
Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, eds., Dictionary of American
Regional English (3 vols., A-O, 1985-96); Norman Eliason,
Tarheel Talk (1956); Crawford Feagin, Variation and Change
in Alabama English (1979); Ellen Johnson, Lexical Change and
Variation in the Southeastern United States (1996); William A.
Kretzschmar et al., Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the
 854 I Speech and Dialect
Middle and South Atlantic States (1994); Hans Kurath, A
Word Geography of the Eastern United States (1949); James B.
McMillan and Michael B. Montgomery, Annotated Bibliogra-
phy of Southern American English (1989); Michael Montgom-
ery and Guy Bailey, eds., Language Variety in the South: Per-
spectives in Black and White (1986); Lee Pederson, Handbook
for the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (1986); Dennis Pres-
ton, "The South: The Touchstone," in Language Variety in the
South Revisited (1997); Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian,
Appalachian Speech (1976); Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schil-
ling-Estes, American English: Dialects and Variation (1998);
Gordon Wood, Vocabulary Change (1971).
SPORTS LITERATURE
It is no accident that in Cold Mountain (1997) Charles
Frazier narrates a Native American ballgame to define
his leading character. He follows in the footsteps of
Thomas Wolfe, Harry Crews, Louis D. Rubin Jr., Wil-
lie Morris, Frank Dobie, Richard Ford, and other
noted southern authors who have used sports to de-
velop plots, tell a story, describe a character, or trace
history. Indeed, sport has been a major theme in south-
ern literature and has been used extensively from colo-
nial times to the present. From the roar of the bear, to
the roar of "Bear" Bryant, to the roar of stock-car en-
gines, sport is alive and flourishing in contemporary
southern literature.
Sports literature in the South has accelerated as
sporting opportunities have dramatically increased in
American life. A southern accent is often pronounced,
as in Andy Griffith's famous monologue "What It Was
Was Football" (recorded in 1953). The first theme to
emerge in sports literature in the American South was
"Man Against the Frontier," a theme still present as
late as Faulkner's "The Bear" (1942). Jennie Holli-
man's American Sports 1785-1835 (1931) chronicles
this major theme. The second theme is the rise of the
"Sports Heroes and the Heroic Ideal," which lasted
until the early 1950s. In his book The Achievement of
American Sport Literature: A Critical Appraisal
(1991), Lee Umphlett gives an excellent overview of
the second phase. The South has been a significant
force in a third phase, "Big-Time Collegiate and Com-
mercial Sports." A large number of contemporary
works attest to this theme. A good example is The
SEC: A Pictorial History of Southeastern Conference
Football (1979) by Bert Sugar. Some topics and
themes, such as hunting and fishing, recur across all
three time phases. For example, Charles Whitehead's
The Campfires of the Everglades; or, Wild Sports in the
South (1991) develops the theme of the outdoor life ex-
tensively.
Prior to the late 1880s, sports literature in the
American South emphasized Man Against the Frontier.
This first theme contains two major subgroups, urban
and rural. The urban subgroup features narrative ac-
counts of sports practiced by the wealthy planters in
and around Charleston, Savannah, Richmond, and
New Orleans. These narratives reflect sports practiced
in England that became common in the plantation era,
included riding to the hunt, hunting clubs, cockfight-
ing, and sailing. An early example of urban sports liter-
ature in the South is Irvin's The South Carolina Jockey
Club (1857), which describes early horse racing in
South Carolina. The rural subgroup of early sport liter-
ature in the American South characterized survival
sports such as hunting, fishing, wrestling, or "the
fight." Although hunting and fishing accounts can be
found in both urban and rural narratives, there was a
distinction based on one's standing in society. William
Elliott's Carolina Sports By Land and Water (1846) il-
lustrates the combination of urban hunting and fishing
with the planters' approach to fishing.
The sports literature of the nineteenth century em-
phasized the forest and the frontier, or man against na-
ture. The accounts describe hunting, fishing, horse rac-
ing, as well as the rough-and-tumble sports of rural
areas of the South: bear hunts, wrestling matches, dog-
fights, cockfights-which often involved gambling. The
place of the fight is portrayed in Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835). In some fights,
participants sought to put the opponent's eyes out by
pressing thumbs into his eye sockets. William T. Porter
edited The Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf,
Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage
(1957) for three decades prior to the Civil War. In addi-
tion, Porter edited two famous collections of humor
and sports, The Big Bear of Arkansas (1854) and A
Quarter Race in Kentucky (1846). George Washington
Harris's Sut Lovingood Yarns (1867) captures the rural
essence of early southern sport. Peter Hawker's In-
structions to Young Sportsmen went through eleven
editions from 1814 to 1893. Perhaps more than any-
one else, Porter helped create the "Big Bear School of
Humor," combining humor and sports life.
In the 1930s Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and
Robert Penn Warren utilized college team and field
sports, contributing thereby to the second phase in
sports literature, "Sports Heroes and the Heroic

Ideal." This theme focused on team sports in colleges
and emphasized baseball, football, and the heroic ideal
(man rising to the occasion when faced by insurmount-
able odds, and "snatching" victory from the jaws of
defeat). Tennessee Williams in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1955) includes as a major character a former college
football player. In All The King's Men (1946) by Rob-
ert Penn Warren, Governor Willie Stark's son Tom is a
football player whose sport mirrors the political ambi-
tions of his father and the compromises inherent in
major college athletics. In The Hamlet (1940), Faulk-
ner puts a comic spin on these realities by his portrayal
of Labove. In The Web and the Rock (1939), Wolfe
captured both the innocence of college football rival-
ries and the transitory nature of the glory they embody.
Wolfe wrote rhapsodically and with intelligence about
baseball in three novels: Of Time and the River (1935),
The Web and the Rock (1939), and You Can't Go
Home Again (1940). Wolfe captured that idyllic time
in baseball before strikes and holdouts, asking "And is
there anything that can tell more about an American
summer than, say, the smell of the wooden bleachers in
a small town baseball park?" Through his portrait of
the famous baseball player Nebraska Crane, Wolfe
also foreshadowed some of the future problems in-
volved with professional sports. Crane transcends the
temptation of professional sports because he is true to
his Appalachian ethical heritage.
Grantland Rice began his career in the second phase
of sports literature at the Nashville Banner and helped
to usher in the era of "Big-Time Commercial Sports."
Rice pioneered the art of mass-culture sports literature
by his prolific publishing of prose and poetry. He con-
tributed the most quotable sports quotation in modern
sports literature ("When the one great scorer ... ").
Rice· was a graduate of Vanderbilt University, as was
James Dickey, another noted writer who preserved a
modern version of the theme of Man Against the Fron-
tier in his novel Deliverance (1970), which features
overcoming natural and man-made obstacles. Dickey,
who had played football at Clemson, used sports in nu-
merous poems, for example, "The Death of Vince
Lombardi."
The importance of Big-Time Commercial Sports is
omnipresent in the mid- to late-twentieth-century
South. NASCAR has thrived. The place of basketball
in the psyche of Kentucky and North Carolina is leg-
endary. With the growth of the Sunbelt economies has
come a proliferation of professional teams throughout
the South in numerous sports, including ice hockey.
Sports Literature / 855
The South provides opportunities for golfing year
around. A proliferation of how-to articles, as-told-to
biographies, and triumphs in these sports has followed.
From Talladega, Alabama, to Texas, and from
Charlotte, North Carolina, to Japan, the lore and leg-
end of the stock-car racer has been disseminated. Sylvia
Wilkinson, author of Stock Cars (1981) and In Dirt
Tracks to Glory: The Early Days of Stock Car Racing
as Told by the Participants (1983) was one of the earli-
est serious writers on the stock-car racing industry. In
American Zoom: Stock Car Racing-From the Dirt
Tracks to Daytona (1993), Peter Golenbock provides
an overview of the early history of NASCAR. Jerry
Bledsoe, author of The World's Number One, Flat
Out, All-Time Great, Stock Car Racing Book (1971)
is also on the cutting edge of this movement in sports
literature.
At the same time that NASCAR began to flourish,
team sports also attracted mass appeal. H. G. Bissing-
er's Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and A
Dream (1990) is rapidly becoming a minor classic of
the genre. It shows the controversial aspects of Friday-
night football in Odessa, Texas, where high-school
games often draw twenty thousand or more fans. Al-
though Bissinger himself is not a native southerner, he
illustrates the controversial aspects of big-time high-
school sports in the South in a thought-provoking
manner. In fact, the natives of Odessa, Texas, and Per-
mian High School call him a traitor. Pat Conroy in The
Prince of Tides (1992) uses a down-and-out football
coach as the protagonist and utilizes football in several
other novels. Peter Gent in North Dallas Forty (1973)
points out the problems with professional football, be-
ginning a series of attack-books that illustrate the
problems associated with big-time sports, notably
drugs and violence. A work that looks at the tensions
of college athletic recruiting is Willie Morris's The
Courting of Marcus Dupree (1992), one of his many
sports books.
Louis D. Rubin Jr., like Thomas Wolfe, is a baseball
aficionado. He has published a novel about baseball,
Surfaces of a Diamond (1981), a collection of essays
entitled Babe Ruth's Ghost and Other Historical and
Literary Speculations (1996), and a monograph enti-
tled The Boll Weevil and the Triple Play (1979). Each
of these works heavily relies on baseball to recall child-
hood and illustrate baseball's status in America. Bill
Kirkland's Eddie Neville of the Durham Bulls (1993)
reflects the trials and tribulations of playing minor
league baseball. A developing classic is Donald Hays's
 856 I Sports Literature
The Dixie Association (1984), which provides its
minor-league baseball teams with colorful names de-
rived from southern literature. The book is filled with
the expected heroic deeds of the pitcher.
Roy H. Parker in The Final Four (1981) introduces
readers to big-time college basketball. An overview of
the rise of a powerful college athletic conference can be
found in Bruce A. Corrie's history, The Atlantic Coast
Conference: 1953-1978 (1978). This book reflects the
hold that basketball has on North Carolina, Kentucky,
and the rest of the Southeast. The heroic ideal in bas-
ketball is perhaps personified best by Michael Jordan's
exploits, some of which have been published in George
Beahm's Michael Jordan: A Shooting Star (1994). Jor-
dan, from Wilmington, North Carolina, played basket-
ball at UNC-Chapel Hill before starring for the Chi-
cago Bulls and is universally acknowledged as the
greatest player of all time. An example of a book that
changed the course of sports is Peter Golenbock's Per-
sonal Fouls (1989). The book relates the furor over the
lack of academic standards at North Carolina State
University, culminating in coach Jim Valvano's resig-
nation. A number of other books exist documenting
the popularity of professional basketball in the South.
Although team sports made a large contribution to
sports literature in the South, individual sports also re-
ceived a share of the spotlight. Golf courses and golf
literature have exploded simultaneously in the Ameri-
can South. Richard S. Tufts aptly documents the begin-
ning of golf in The Scottish Invasion (1962). William
Hallberg at East Carolina University has written The
Soul of Golf (1997) and The Rub of The Green (1988),
and has edited an anthology of golf-course lore entitled
Perfect Lies (1990). Hallberg is joined in his efforts to
appraise golf by William Price Fox, author of Doctor
Golf(1994) and Golfing in the Carolinas (1990). Rich-
ard Coop addressed the psychological aspects of golf
with Mind Over Golf: How to Use Your Mind to
Lower Your Score (1995). Golfing and golf courses are
recurring motifs in Walker Percy's fiction, highlighting
a Sunbelt mind-set and postmodern artifice.
In The Tennis Handsome (1983), Barry Hannah
created the quintessential postmodern sports novel set
in the South, the zany action revolving around a tennis
player and his coach.
Not only are team and individual sports the objects
of contemporary sport literature, but so are the blood
sports of yesteryear. Harry Crews, in Florida Frenzy
(1982), explores the blood sports of cockfighting and
dogfighting and uses sports in other titles such as The
Knockout Artist (1988). There is good reason that the
University of South Carolina has a gamecock as its
mascot. Indeed, the sports of cockfighting and dog-
fighting still exist in the Southeast. The major newspa-
per covering cockfighting in South Carolina is pub-
lished to this day. Furthermore, romantic novels of the
Old South and numerous tall tales are filled with sto-
ries of fortunes won and lost at the horse races, cock
pits, and card tables. Faulkner's "Was" begins Go
Down, Moses (1942) with a card game and a major
gamble. Joel Chandler Harris begins "Free Joe and the
Rest of the World" (1887) by creating a prototypical
card gamester. In Keeper of the Moon: A Southern
Boyhood (1991), Tim Mclaurin describes a dogfight
and reflects on its psychology.
In addition to blood sports, horse sports are still an
important source of sports literature. The Kentucky
Derby, the Camden Cup, the Blockade Run, and polo
in Aiken, South Carolina, illustrate the South's contin-
ued love of fast horses. Elizabeth Blanchard and Manly
Wellman's The Story of America's Greatest Thorough-
bred: The Life and Times of Sir Archie, 1805-1833
(1959) further illustrates the impact of horse racing on
North Carolina and the entire South. Faulkner's last
novel, The Reivers (1961), recounts the initiation of
young Lucius Priest into the polarities of life; the boy's
adventures culminate in a horse race.
Hunting and fishing stories have been staples in
southern lore from colonial times to the present day.
Clarence Gohdes's Hunting in the American South
(1967) presents an excellent overview, as do the over
seventy works of Archibald Rutledge, a poet laureate
of South Carolina. Hunting & Home in the Southern
Heartland: The Best of Archibald Rutledge (1992), ed-
ited by Jim Casada, anthologizes the prose used by
Rutledge to describe hunting and fishing. Hunting and
Fishing in the Great Smokies (1948) by Jim Gasque
combines appreciation for the beauty of the mountains
and the love of sports in the South. Buck Paysour in
Bass Fishing in North Carolina (1977) displays the an-
glers' love of his sport. Stuart Marks in Southern Hunt-
ing in Black & White: Nature, History and Ritual in a
Carolina Community (1991) provides an excellent col-
lection of hunting stories. Havilah Babcock's My
Health Is Better in November (1993) contains a series
of hunting stories set in the South. In such works,
southerners continue to be portrayed as an outdoors
people.
Sports poetry has not been neglected in the Ameri-
can South. Archibald Rutledge, Michael Mcfee, James

Applewhite, Chuck Sullivan, Charles Eaton, Fred
Chappell, and others have used poetry to describe
sports. Don Johnson, editor of Hummers, Knucklers,
and Slow Curves (1991), along with Robert Higgs, au-
thor of Laurel & Thorn: The Athlete in American Lit-
erature (1981), have gathered poems on southern
sports. Gene Pehler, author of Center Field Grasses:
Poems from Baseball (1991) uses poetry to tell the
story of baseball, and I Hit the Ball! (1996) illustrates
youth's love of baseball.
Not until the U.S. Congress passed Title IX did the
South see significant change in the role of women's
sports. The signs are numerous that change is under-
way. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
has established a dynasty in women's soccer, and wom-
en's basketball in the Atlantic Coast Conference (some-
times considered the best conference for basketball in
the nation) has continued to attract fans and support,
although the University of Tennessee's women's bas-
ketball team has established itself as the dominant na-
tional team from the South. Mia Hamm (legendary in
UNC soccer) has become to women's soccer what Mi-
chael Jordan is to men's basketball. A literature re-
flecting the rapid growth of women's sports will surely
follow. Opportunities for women in athletics prior to
Title IX were primarily limited to cheerleading. Good
examples of that activity as a reflector of gender inequi-
ties may be found in Lee Smith's Black Mountain
Breakdown (1980), Jill McCorkle's The Cheer Leader
(1984), and Bobbie Ann Mason's story "State Champi-
ons" (1989).
Sports literature has become very meaningful to a
large group of southern writers. The Sport Literature
Association (SLA), established in 1983, is housed at
East Tennessee State University. The leadership of Don
Johnson, Lyle Olsen, and Don Higgs at ETSU has
helped establish a notable journal specifically related to
sport literature. Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Litera-
ture has won plaudits and praise, both from its readers
and librarians. The journal encourages new authors,
serves as a critical analysis center, and promotes excel-
lence and scholarship.
Ronald W. Hyatt
See also Horses and Horse Racing; Hunting; Sportsmen.
Robert J. Higgs, Laurel & Thorn: The Athlete in American Lit-
erature (1981); Wiley L. Umphlett, ed., The Achievement of
American Sport Literature: A Critical Appraisal (1991); David
Sportsmen I 857
Vanderwerken and Spencer K. Wertz, Sport: Inside Out
(1985).
SPORTSMEN
The term sport refers to play or pastime, often in the
form of a game or contest, and circumscribed by rules
that are sometimes sanctioned by judges. Sports re-
quire the demonstration of physical prowess and skill
according to established rules and are undertaken prin-
cipally as a diversion for those taking part or for those
observing. As the pursuit of evasive prey, hunting had
its origins in an early human subsistence strategy. It be-
came a sport as society developed its social structures
and technologies, including the domestication of some
forms of life to pursue others. Beginning in England,
the Industrial Revolution brought about profound
changes in hunting as a sport and in its terminology. As
the privileged pursuit of prey with hounds from atop
horses, "hunting" became an elite exercise that few
could afford. On the other hand, "shooting" increased
in popularity with the perfection of firearms and the
breeding of specialized dogs to point, flush, and re-
trieve the "game," which increasingly became pen-
raised birds. Although fox hunting continued around
the estates in Britain, the larger and more "evasive"
mammals ("big game") could be pursued only else-
where on other continents. Whereas the animal sports
of the gentry remained beyond legislative definition
until recently (1998), the animal sports of the common
man, such as cockfighting, bull and bear baiting, and
rat fighting were considered barbarous and banned in
keeping with a widespread desire on the part of city
dwellers to curtail brutalities in animal sports.
A similar framework is useful for interpreting the
activities of hunting sportsmen on the southern land-
scape since its colonization by large masses of British
immigrants. Here hunting has retained its democratic
sense as an activity in which anyone can participate,
while everyone who pursues wild game today calls
himself a "sportsman." Yet those who must hunt out
of necessity and those doing so as a diversion remain as
the discriminatory distinction.
In the Old South, the discriminating rules were de-
veloped by the planters, notably William Elliott of
South Carolina. While most southern folk depended on
some wildlife for food and as an economic resource,
planters pursued game for other less-mundane pur-
poses. Planters, such as Elliott, sought to emulate in the
 858 / Sportsmen
New World the privileges and refinements in Old
World field sports. They did so by continuing to give
chase to the large game in their neighborhoods long
after such forms had been extirpated in Europe and
hunters there had turned to rearing and stocking birds.
The sporting narratives of southern hunters were con-
structep in a way that was consistent with their views
about human nature, society, and the world. In their
hunting roles, planters saw themselves as decisive char-
acters in relation to a much wider web of life that in-
cluded many classes of humans as well as those of prey.
As strong-willed actors in a world of order and stabil-
ity structured through their own actions and activities,
their hunting narratives were both personal and con-
crete.
Field sports were the domain of men, Elliott and the
other planters clearly scripting in their narratives the
roles of everyone on the playing field. Elliott called, or
tried to limit, the shots in his backyard. Those asked
to join Elliott on horseback as players were considered
peers, while those remaining on the ground were desig-
nated lesser social beings who drove and collected his
game. Different behaviors and diverse fields mirrored
the social structure of the Old South and kept separate
the various actors after the game. Mounted planters
pursued game in broad daylight and became absorbed
in their diversions while surrounded by retinues of ser-
vants and pedigreed hounds. Most other social groups
hunted for table or for sale with whatever means they
were most comfortable. Slaves took game mostly at
night when they could afford the time to give the slip to
their owners. The planter's harshest punishments were
reserved for those caught taking "his" deer, especially
in collusion with overseers and with unsanctioned
means such as with spikes and by firelight.
Before the Civil War, sportsmen were comparatively
few. These kept in touch by reading and contributing
to The American Turf Register and Spirit of the Times,
irregular periodicals that largely reproduced English
sporting codes and standards for the New World. After
the war, the spread of industrialization and urbaniza-
tion beginning initially in the North and coming later
in the South, together with improvements in transpor-
tation and firearms, created a desire among urbanites
to return to the land and to their primitive pastime of
besting the beasts. These developments, in conjunction
with mass media and sporting journals, standardized
expectations and behavior while changing the nature
of the game for everyone. The age of the sportsman ex-
pressed itself through its various socioeconomic stars
and stripes.
These sportsmen shared a particular world view de-
fined by attitude, motivation, and affiliation. Such
sportsmen pursued their quarries in a highly standard-
ized manner, employed a technical vocabulary explicit
about game and guns, showed a lively interest in natu-
ral history, personally followed a code of ethics,
dressed fashionably during the quest, bought highly
trained and pedigreed dogs, and belonged to cosmo-
politan connections that established the rules they fol-
lowed. Only certain prey could be legally taken and
these only in a highly defined and refined manner. The
objective of their games must be given the option to
show that it truly understood fair chase.
As game became scarce at the turn of the twentieth
century, sporting associations forced the hand of those
who hunted for market, putting them legally out of
business. Sportsmen's widespread clout in the political
arena not only defined what was to be pursued as
"game" (defining wildlife species in legal categories)
but found the means by which paid referees (game war-
dens) policed the playing fields to enforce the new
world views. The stakes of getting caught in violation
by a warden were higher than those personal contests
between the deer-hunting types of Uncle Isaac McCas-
lin and Roth Edmonds in William Faulkner's "Delta
Autumn" (1942).
The life and diversions of southerners living in the
late twentieth century bring new conditions and chal-
lenges to the wildlife game. With most southerners
now residents and participants in urban life, they take
greater stock in their pets as a vision of their world
view than as targets for their practice. With most gam-
ing fields (read habitats) now enveloped in the expand-
ing suburbs and transected with ribbons of asphalt,
turf upon which to exercise sporting skills has become
hard to find. Furthermore, the sensibilities of most
sportsmen have turned in other directions. Many of the
game species formerly pursued in the backcountry are
now found within the city limits, and an annual toll is
taken as road kills and in property damage. Such
changes will inevitably call for the setting of a different
agenda along with new guideposts for southern sports-
men and -women yet to be.
Stuart A. Marks
See also Hunting.
William Elliott, Carolina Sports by Land and Water; Including
Incidents of Devil-Fishing, Wild-Cat, Deer and Bear Hunting,

Etc. (1859); Stuart A. Marks, Southern Hunting in Black and
White: Nature, History, and Ritual in a Carolina Community
(1991); Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy (1958); Ar-
chibald Rutledge, Old Plantation Days (1921).
STATES' RIGHTS
The phrase states' rights refers to the doctrine that
states possess important rights of self-government that
cannot be transgressed by the federal government.
From Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun in the
early Republic to Sam Ervin and George Wallace in
more recent times, the greatest champions of states'
rights have come from the South. Although constitu-
tional principles account in part for the South's histori-
cal devotion to states' rights, more often southerners
have appealed to the doctrine to defend particular po-
litical, economic, or social interests.
Predating the U.S. Constitution, states' rights issues
had antecedents in the colonial period. The struggles of
the 1760s and 1770s between Great Britain and its
North American colonies over taxation and trade regu-
lation rested on different conceptions of federalism, or
the balance between central and local authority, within
the British Empire. The American Revolution pitted
supporters of Parliament's power to legislate for the
colonies against those who insisted that each colony
should control its own internal affairs. Following the
Declaration of Independence, leaders in the new states
jealously guarded their powers of home rule and only
reluctantly created a new central authority to replace
Crown and Parliament. Under the first constitution of
the United States, the Articles of Confederation (1781),
the states instituted a weak general government while
retaining enormous power for themselves. Representa-
tives to the Confederation Congress acted as ambassa-
dors with little except moral suasion to compel states
to pay taxes or achieve consensus. Although the Con-
federation government accomplished more than its de-
tractors claimed or than many historians have ac-
knowledged, its inability to regulate commerce among
the states and to perform similar functions led to calls
for a new political order.
The Constitution of 1787 accorded new powers to
the federal government, but it left the relationship be-
tween the states and the central government ambigu-
ous at best and thereby opened the door to interpretive
battles over its meaning. In the early Republic, Federal-
ists and then Whigs construed the Constitution as a na-
States' Rights / 859
tionalist document by which the people of the United
States transferred most powers from the states to a
strong central government. They argued that the "elas-
tic clause" (article I, section 8) gave Congress broad
powers to do anything necessary and proper for the na-
tional good. Jeffersonian Republicans and their Demo-
cratic Party successors countered that sovereign and in-
dependent states ratified the Constitution solely to
create a general government for clearly specified and
limited purposes such as overseeing defense, foreign
policy, and interstate commerce. As Jefferson and
James Madison argued in the Virginia and Kentucky
Resolutions (1798-1799), the Constitution is a com-
pact among the states and the federal government
merely the states' agent.
During the antebellum decades, most southerners,
even some avowedly nationalist ones like Calhoun,
turned to states' rights to defend their economic and
social life. Southerners relied on states' rights primarily
because they could no longer exert their former influ-
ence in the federal government; for example, the slave-
holding South's share of U.S. House seats fell from 46
percent in the 1790s to just under 38 percent in the last
Congress before secession. Building on the compact
theory of Jefferson and Madison, Calhoun declared
that a state could nullify any federal law it considered
unconstitutional and even secede from the Union at
will. South Carolina endorsed that formulation of
states' rights during the nullification controversy over
tariff policy (1832-1833 ), but most southern states'
rights supporters at that time considered nullification
too extreme. Over the next quarter-century, however,
alarmed by rising abolitionist and free soil sentiment in
the North, southerners increasingly took refuge in Cal-
houn's ideas. Only a strong states' rights stand coupled
with the threat of secession, they believed, could keep
at bay a northern majority aligned against the slave
South. When the Republican Party, created in the
1850s to protest the extension of slavery into western
territories, succeeded in electing Abraham Lincoln
president, southerners feared the worst. From Decem-
ber 1860 to May 1861, eleven southern states seceded
from the Union rather than live under a federal govern-
ment they considered hostile to slavery.
The Confederate Constitution recognized states'
rights more explicitly than did the U.S. Constitution,
but it did not wholly eliminate the ambiguities and ten-
sions arising from the 1787 document. The Confeder-
ates' charter noted that each state acted "in its sover-
eign and independent character" in creating the new
 860 / States' Rights
common government, but it remained silent on the
right of secession from the Confederacy. Some south-
ern governors, notably Georgia's Joseph E. Brown and
North Carolina's Zebulon Vance, invoked states'
rights principles to resist conscription and other war-
time demands made by Confederate president Jefferson
Davis. The governors' recalcitrance hurt the southern
war effort, but certainly historian Frank Owsley went
too far in declaring that the Confederacy "died of
states' rights."
During the late nineteenth century and well into the
twentieth, white southern politicians employed states'
rights to justify white supremacist policies such as the
disfranchisement of blacks and the enforcement of ra-
cial segregation in public accommodations. Southern
governors even called out their state militias to oppose
federal laws and court rulings favorable to blacks, as
Orval Faubus and Ross Barnett did during the desegre-
gation crises at Little Rock's Central High School
(1957) and the University of Mississippi (1962), re-
spectively.
The traditionally states' rights-friendly Democratic
Party, which dominated the South after Reconstruc-
tion, served as the bulwark of white supremacy until
some of its important nonsouthern constituencies
began advocating equal civil rights for African Ameri-
cans. When the 1948 national Democratic Convention
adopted a civil-rights plank, southern delegates with-
drew to form their own short-lived party. Significantly,
these segregationists called themselves States' Rights
Democrats (more popularly, "Dixiecrats") as they car-
ried four Deep South states for their presidential candi-
date, South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond. Per-
manent realignment followed as Democratic presidents
John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pushed a civil-
rights agenda resulting in the passage of the Civil
Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). In
1964, Thurmond switched to the Republican Party,
and over the next thirty years throngs of whites fol-
lowed. By the 1990s, the GOP was the party of most
white southerners and, not coincidentally, the defender
of states' rights.
Although the history of states' rights in the South
has been closely associated with racial control, the doc-
trine is not inherently racist. Rather, in our ambiguous
federal system, states' rights is a weapon that political
minorities of all stripes have wielded to protect their
various interests against a national majority. Just as
white southerners used it to maintain their legal privi-
leges at the expense of African Americans, New En-
gland Federalists in the early nineteenth century re-
sorted to states' rights to defend their property from a
federal trade embargo. The delicate balancing act of
federalism will likely persist under different guises. As
Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson noted in 1908, the
question of the proper relationship between the states
and the federal government cannot "be settled by the
opinion of any one generation ... every successive
stage of our political and economic development gives
it a new aspect, makes it a new question."
Robert Tinkler
See also Confederate States of America; Nullification.
Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy,
States' Rights and the Nullification Crisis (1987); Don E. Feh-
renbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism
(1995); Kermit L. Hall and James W. Ely Jr., An Uncertain Tra-
dition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South (1989);
Alpheus Thomas Mason, The States Rights Debate: Antifeder-
alism and the Constitution {2nd ed.; 1972).
STEEL MAGNOLIA
Steel Magnolia describes an ambiguous style of elite
white southern womanhood melding genteel feminin-
ity with strength, determination, and intelligence. The
term describes the contrast between the demure per-
sona of the southern belle, who has the delicacy of
magnolia blossoms, and the inner core of steel neces-
sary to endure hardship.
The figure of the Steel Magnolia evolved during and
after the Civil War, born of the collapse of the man's
role as protector. Although the antebellum wife
worked actively to manage her household, when the
war took husbands away, the woman ran the farm or
plantation, thereby gaining a power and self-reliance at
odds with the modest, submissive ideal of the southern
lady. When her husband returned, crushed by military
defeat and his loss of power over the slaves, the woman
retreated into her sheltered role as the man attempted
to re-create the stability of the antebellum South,
where the woman's subordination to her husband had
paralleled the slave's subordination to the master.
Likely, she celebrated the return to protection after the
physically and emotionally grueling tasks of managing
slaves and household under the dire conditions of war.
The woman once again devoted her energies to charm
and motherhood, although the war-born independence

and sense of responsibility remained underneath her la-
dylike fa~ade.
Southern writers have created literary representa-
tions of the Steel Magnolia to explore her balancing of
feminine behavior and masculine control. In The Un-
vanquished (1938), William Faulkner portrays Rosa
Millard, Granny, as the heroic, gutsy, hard-working
moral center of the family during the Civil War. She
outwits the Yankees to get her silver and mules back,
and to protect the young Bayard and Ringo, she faces
down a Yankee captain inside her home. While usurp-
ing the power of a plantation master, Granny continues
her feminine responsibility of providing religious and
moral instruction, praying for forgiveness for running
a mule ring, and washing out with soap mouths that
have lied or cursed, even though she lies herself to pro-
tect the children. Her mettle defines her as the arche-
typal Civil War Steel Magnolia. Another Civil War
protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara of Margaret Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind (1936), combines the feminine
charm, sexuality, and vulnerability allowed southern
women with a feisty self-reliance. Scarlett steps out of
the domestic, compliant role for women, running Tara
and a sawmill, ultimately becoming a business woman.
Scarlett matures from a southern belle to a particular
version of the Steel Magnolia, one whose ambivalence
about motherhood and whose vacillation between her
needs for dependence and independence show her cre-
ator's inside perspective of the confusion felt by intelli-
gent, assertive women in a world expecting passivity.
Tennessee Williams's Amanda Wingfield provides
another view of the Steel Magnolia. In The Glass Me-
nagerie (1945), Williams portrays Amanda as a would-
be belle whose husband's desertion mirrors the Civil
War family's loss of the male as protector. Amanda be-
lieves charm and beauty will capture a gentleman caller
for her daughter, but she also plays the masculine role
of head of household. Although she openly challenges
her son Tom, with the outsider Jim O'Connor Amanda
reverts to feminine wiles, pretending to be frivolous
and carefree. Williams's final stage directions, giving
Amanda "dignity," honor her inner strength.
Robert Harling's 1987 play Steel Magnolias cele-
brates what is perhaps a masculine view of the Steel
Magnolia, the self-sacrificing mother supported by a
community of emotionally strong women. Recalling
the antebellum notion of motherhood as a woman's sa-
cred occupation, this play defines good southern wom-
anhood as desiring and loving a child. Diabetic Shelby
knowingly sacrifices her health to have a baby; when
Stoicism I 861
her kidneys fail, her mother gladly gives one of her kid-
neys to her daughter. When Shelby's body ultimately
deteriorates, M'Lynn alone watches her daughter die
after doctors remove the life-support machines. Shel-
by's husband and father leave the room. It is M'Lynn
who organizes the funeral, and it is her women friends,
not her husband or son-in-law, who linger at the grave
to comfort the grieving mother. M'Lynn expresses the
irony that the men, who are supposed to be made of
steel, cannot endure witnessing Shelby's death. In 1989
Tristar Pictures made Harling's off-Broadway play,
which was based on the death of his sister and set in
his home state of Louisiana, into a major motion pic-
ture starring Sally Field, Olympia Dukakis, Shirley
MacLaine, Julia Roberts, and Dolly Parton.
A variation of the Steel Magnolia figure may be seen
in Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny
Weatherall" (1930). A resilient woman, Granny
Weatherall is a nurturing mother who raises her chil-
dren alone after her husband's death and puts up
fences herself when she has no man to do it. Although
not of the elite social class, Granny possesses a practi-
cality and dignity born of surviving tribulation. She
lives in the tradition of the strong but feminine south-
ern woman who maintains a ladylike, mostly deferen-
tial public self while sustaining a private strength.
Rebecca G. Smith
See also Belle; Lady; New Woman.
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slave-
holding South in the Civil War (1996); Anne Goodwyn Jones,
Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South,
1859-1936 (1981); Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern
Womanhood (1994).
STOICISM
Many members of the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and
early-twentieth-century southern upper class, whatever
their true bloodlines, saw themselves as counterparts of
the established Old World aristocracy, particularly that
of England, and sought to imitate the values, tastes,
manners, and education of the English gentry. This ed-
ucation was "classical," involving the reading of a
number of the literary, oratorical, and philosophical
works of ancient Greco-Roman culture-both in the
original languages and (especially with Greek works)
in translation. A number of the most widely read
 862 I Stoicism
works were those that promoted the values of the
school of philosophy that perhaps more than any other
distilled the essential elements of classical thought-
Stoicism. Founded in Athens around 301 B.C. by Zeno
"the Phoenician," Stoicism was brought to Rome by
the philosopher Panaetius around 146 B.C. There it
was powerfully articulated in several of the philosophi-
cal treatises of the great Republican orator Cicero and
adopted by such major thinkers and writers as Epic-
tetus, Seneca, and Emperor Marcus Aurelius, becom-
ing the dominant Roman school for at least two centu-
ries. Stoic cosmology affirmed that however evil or
chaotic the world might appear to be, the universe was
ordered for the best by a pervasive rational spirit or en-
ergy, the Logos. Stoic ethics, the crux of its philosophy,
encompassed the "cardinal virtues" of prudence (wis-
dom), fortitude, justice, and temperance and were de-
signed to inculcate a rational self-control that would
allow a person to face all of life's difficulties and appar-
ent evils with serene moral constancy or apatheia.
Despite Stoicism's affirmation of the equality of all
human beings as possessors of the divine reason and
will, the Stoic advocacy of courageous adherence to
duty and of disciplined avoidance of the passionate ir-
rationality of the multitude held a natural attraction
for those who occupied seats of honor in classical and
later Western culture-upper-class men. The upper-
class Englishmen after whom American southerners
modeled themselves had found for centuries a special
appeal in the ethical teachings of Cicero's Duties, Epic-
tetus's Discourses and Manual, Seneca's Moral Essays
and Epistles, and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and
in classical literature portraying the unswerving forti-
tude of Odysseus, Hercules, and Aeneas and the ur-
bane dispassion of the Horatian gentleman-poet.
The political and economic turbulence that often
plagued the nineteenth-century South, along with its
need in the antebellum period to characterize its slave-
based agrarian life-style as part of a larger, beneficent
order, may have given the region a special impetus for
cleaving to Stoic teachings. At any rate, prominent
southerners through the generations, from Thomas Jef-
ferson to Robert E. Lee to William Alexander Percy,
continued to read Stoic texts and embrace recognizably
Stoic values. Nor was the nineteenth-century South's
intense fascination with the romantic chivalry of Sir
Walter Scott wholly inconsistent with its attraction to
Stoicism. Transmitted by a number of means into
medieval European culture, Stoicism powerfully influ-
enced the chivalric code of honor and its later incarna-
tions in succeeding centuries. Despite its inconsistency
with crucial aspects of Christian doctrine, Stoicism
worked together with Christianity to refine some of the
grossness out of the militant clan loyalties and vendet-
tas of primitive honor.
The honor code of the southern gentleman as it is
represented in the sentimentalized literature of the
nineteenth-century South and in the great works of
the Southern Literary Renascence and afterward in the
twentieth century owes a great deal to Stoicism. In
Marse Chan of Thomas Nelson Page's sentimental
nineteenth-century story, who greets the rejection of
his romantic love with unflinching gallantry; Colonel
John Sartoris of William Faulkner's The Unvan-
quished, who, closely pursued by Yankee troops,
coolly jumps his horse out a back window of his own
barn; Atticus Finch of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking-
bird, who at the risk of his reputation and his family's
physical safety defends African American Tom Robin-
son from trumped-up rape charges and refuses to re-
spond with violence to Bob Ewell's public insult; and
Emily Cutrer of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, who
rails persuasively against the faithlessness and moral
degradation of mid-twentieth-century America, the
reader is observing literary embodiments of Stoic cour-
age, self-control, justice, and moral commitment.
The other part of the story, however, is the decline
of this old order of moral values amid the cultural tur-
moil of the modern world, a decline recorded in the
quixotic futility of the Stoic knighthood of John Crowe
Ransom's "Captain Carpenter"; the moral impotence
of Horace Benbow in Faulkner's Sanctuary; the moral
compromise of Judge Irwin in Robert Penn Warren's
All the King's Men and of the elder Lamar of Percy's
Lancelot; and the anguished suicide of Quentin Comp-
son in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and of the
elder Barrett in Percy's The Last Gentleman and The
Second Coming-suicide being a recognizably Stoic so-
lution. Characters such as Will Barrett, who in the
wake of the old code's failure must search desperately
to avoid despair and suicide themselves, are an addi-
tional fictional manifestation of this decline, although
characters in more-recent southern literature who lack
any inkling of moral meaningfulness seem even worse
off. The dissolution of the old southern socioeconomic
hierarchy and the advance of scientific naturalism,
which, ironically, is quite consistent with the rational-
empirical bent of Stoicism, are portrayed by Faulkner,
Warren, and Percy as significant reasons for this de-
cline, although Percy's fiction asserts that trying to live

ethically without faith in a forgiving, redeeming per-
sonal God is an inherently vulnerable position, even for
the most courageous and constant of Stoics.
Wendell (Whit) Jones Jr.
See also Honor; Novel, 1900 to World War II; Novel, World
War II to Present; Quixotism; Violence.
Edward Vernon Arnold, Roman Stoicism (1911); Marcia L.
Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle
Ages (2 vols.; 1985); James McBride Dabbs, Who Speaks for
the South? (1964); George Fenwick Jones, Honor in German
Literature (1959); Walker Percy, "Stoicism in the South,"
Commonweal 6 (July 1956); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The
House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a
Southern Family (1994).
STORYTELLING
Twentieth-century southern writers have told many of
this country's most vital stories. William Faulkner's use
of multiple narrators raises the question: how many
people does it take to tell about the South? A good
many, certainly, for the South's story is among the
most complex on the globe. Cultural psychoanalyst
Robert Coles observes that stories, which he calls the
word made flesh, plunge readers into a world of mean-
ing, a world it is tempting to ignore, full as it is of pain
and pettiness, frailty and downright evil. But Coles be-
lieves that ignoring it is to pay a high spiritual price.
Sages from Aristotle to Robert Penn Warren have rec-
ognized that real stories (as opposed to those generated
by movies or TV) transform those who tell them and
those who read them. As the only way to see the inner
lives of others, stories can save readers from self-ab-
sorption and meaninglessness, ignorance, and despair.
Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of
Thomas Sutpen's wresting his one hundred miles from
the "tranquil and astonished earth." The narrators, be-
ginning with Miss Rosa Coldfield and going on with
Quentin, Mr. Compson, General Compson, Henry Sut-
pen, and Charles Bon, reveal more than any other sin-
gle work the South's secret history. Without doubt,
Faulkner is the first storyteller equal to the moral
weight of the story. He evokes the archetypal image of
storytelling: Quentin and his father out on the gallery
in the wisteria summer, smoke from the old man's cigar
intermingling with the sickly sweet of the purple
blooms to echo the beauty and horror of what really
Storytelling I 863
happened. Comic relief comes when Wash Jones
shouts, "Henry has done shot that durn French feller.
Kilt him dead as a beef."
Another storyteller, Elizabeth Spencer, is a master of
allusion. She avoids Faulkner's grandeur even as she
portrays the rise of a ruling class in Fire in the Morn-
ing. Young Kinloch can't stomach his father's submis-
sion to insults and injuries when there's a land-grab
going on, and not until his Cousin Randall Gibson
traces the story back two generations do readers
fathom Dan Armstrong's reasons as well as Spencer's
complex theme: evil passed through generations in vio-
lence and revenge becomes invisible. Spencer satisfies
readers' craving for the inside story even as she leaves
much shrouded in mystery.
Other stories seem to tread more lightly. Tim Gau-
treaux's "Little Frogs in a Ditch" shows old man Fon-
tenot and his grandson Lenny arguing on the front
porch as Lenny schemes to trap and sell common pi-
geons as homing pigeons. Lenny's real story comes
out-that his parents dumped him and moved to an-
other time zone-after he bilks old man Lejeune and
his crippled grandson. Old Lejeune then tells the story
at the climax, using Lenny's cheating to redeem its
meanness. Even small stories examine moral issues and
become microcosms. Real stories trace the playing-out
of forces beyond their characters' control as well as
their writers', who infuse them with what wisdom they
can muster.
Lee Smith believes storytellers start in the dark and
encounter the light, perhaps creating it as they go. All
good stories are, in her sense, explorations. Smith's
work abounds with people telling stories on porches.
Oral History's Little Luther swings to and fro and
strums his dulcimer at his newly met granddaughter
Jennifer, who asks Ora Mae for the story of her "real"
mother's people. Ora Mae won't say a word. It's
Granny Younger who begins the tale that transports
the reader to Hoot Owl Holler where it all began, years
ago, the story of Almarine's love for witchy Emmy and
saintly Pricey Jane, Richard Burlage's doomed passion
for Dory, the doom that comes down to murder, death,
and Amway in the present. There's humor at the heart
of many deep stories.
Eudora Welty has a double-barreled talent-as both
storyteller and critic. She likens stories to "little
worlds," each with its own "atmosphere," and believes
that "characters in the plot connect us to the vastness
of our secret life, which is endlessly explorable" (The
Eye of the Story). Her stories show the seamless and
 864 / Storytelling
humorous surface of small-town life while revealing a
world in ironic opposition. Her story "The Wide Net"
shows William Wallace Jamieson with a note from his
pregnant wife Hazel, who threatens to drown herself
because he stayed out all night. Only after he stays out
most of another night dragging the river and having a
high old time with his buddies do William Wallace and
Hazel sit on the front steps to reconcile their stories.
The reader knows at once that they will make up; only
an after-image shows the unbridgeable gap between
them. Stories, Welty tells us, reveal "the vulnerability
of human imperfection caught up in human emotion,
and so there is growth, there is crisis, there is fulfill-
ment, there is decay."
Missing pieces are often found at middles and ends
of novels. Marianne Gingher's Bobby Rex's Greatest
Hit could not proceed without flashbacks to tell five
stories: how Phoebe met Bobby Rex, how Pally's par-
ents met and married, how Speedy died, why Shilda's
mother left her, and why she had an affair with the
Reverend Von Wicke. Gingher's North Carolina voice
has a cadence unlike those from South Carolina, Geor-
gia, or Virginia. Perhaps only a southerner can under-
stand just how different each state is from the rest.
For every Toni Morrison who tells enough sad slave
stories in Beloved to prove that there never were good
slaveowners, anywhere, there is a scion of the planta-
tion to agree with Thomas Jefferson that slaveowning
was no great character builder for whites either. New
Orleans's Nancy Lemann writes about people who, by
sacrificing their vitality for charm over several genera-
tions, constantly have "breakdowns" and "fall apart."
In their morbid dependency her characters betray their
slaveowning roots. In Sportsman's Paradise, Lemann
names her heroine Storey, perhaps to emphasize the
importance of stories. Living among southern expatri-
ates at Orient Point on Long Island, Storey meets her
old love, Hobby Fox. An odd formality keeps them
mysteriously apart, and not until Storey tells the story,
at the book's climax, of a dishonorable deed in their
past can the lovers find their way toward each other.
Fred Chappell's storytellers sit on porches or in
front of fires sipping whiskey and telling stories about
things that often don't come to much, but may feature
Betty Grable as Helen of Troy in a re-telling of the
Iliad. Stories are told in kitchens, on horseback, camp-
ing out, in restaurants, in the parking lot of the twenty-
four-hour Wal-Mart, anywhere. Pam Durban's "Grav-
ity" is set in a nursing home. Whenever the old lady's
wheelchair faces the Cooper River bridge, Louisa
knows her mother will tell her "the Mamie story"
again, about the needless terror inflicted on an old ser-
vant. Here one sees white callousness, and the trickle-
down consequences of slavery for both races as well.
African American voices, from slave narratives to
postmodern novels, are essential to the dialogue. Rich-
ard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison redeem
brutal stories with art. Black women have done as
much. Alice Walker's The Color Purple tells stories
that go to the heart of poor country people. Zora Neale
Hurston tells the story of her own metamorphosis: the
day she became "colored" she found it out "in certain
ways" and asserts with bravado, "But I am not tragi-
cally colored." Her evolution ends with a cosmic iden-
tity in which all racial colors are part of God's grab-
bag ("How It Feels to Be Colored Me"). Gloria Naylor
makes use of the tales and storytelling tradition of the
Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina
in Mama Day, which tells "the legend of Sapphira
Wade . . . the way we know it, sitting on our porches
and shelling June peas." Air-conditioning and televi-
sion have cost the South many stories as well as occa-
sions for telling them.
Part and counterpart, black and white writers fol-
low a long tradition of tracing the way the past works
itself out in the present. Perhaps they are popular be-
cause they avoid abstractions. The mind of the South is
a vernacular one: southern writers make a story, not a
statement, about what happens. Stories are how people
remember, how they come to understand. As Eudora
Welty says, "Remembering is so basic and vital a part
of staying alive that it takes on the strength of an in-
stinct of survival, and acquires the power of an art"
(The Eye of the Story). From Lee Smith, who never saw
an African American until her teens, to Faulkner him-
self, rooted in Greek tragedy, the South needs every sin-
gle voice. From Appalachia to plantation, from mer-
chant to sharecropper to fugitive slave and African
king, all their tales together cannot exhaust the South's
hoard of meaning.
Nancy Tilly
See also Advice on Writing Southern Fiction; Community;
Faulkner, William; O'Connor, Flannery; Past, The; Telling
about the South; Welty, Eudora.
W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941); Robert Coles, The
Call of Stories (1989); Fred Hobson, Tell About the South
(1983); Robert Penn Warren, "Why Do We Read Fiction?" in

New and Selected Essays (1989); Eudora Welty, The Eye of the
Story (1978).
STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER
A daughter of the prominent New England Protestant
clergyman Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe was
the author of the phenomenally best-selling and influ-
ential antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and a pro-
lific writer of other social and historical novels, re-
gional sketches, domestic, religious, and political
essays, and children's literature. Born in Litchfield,
Connecticut, in 1811, she moved with her family to
Cincinnati in 1832 after her father accepted the presi-
dency of Lane Theological Seminary. She first became
aware of controversy over slavery during this time,
when Theodore Dwight Weld and other Lane students
rebelled against Beecher's lukewarm antislavery posi-
tion-he supported colonizing blacks to Africa-and
left the seminary. Harriet Beecher married Calvin
Stowe, a professor of theology at Lane, in 1836, the
year of major anti-abolitionist riots in Cincinnati. Dur-
ing the mid-1830s she had begun writing for newspa-
pers and magazines; she published her first antislavery
sketch, "Immediate Emancipation," in 1845. After
Calvin was appointed to a chair at Bowdoin College,
she moved to Brunswick, Maine, in 1850; and in 1851,
outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law provision of the
Compromise of 1850, she began working on Uncle
Tom's Cabin, which was serialized over ten months in
the National Era and published as a book in the spring
of 1852. The novel promptly sold out its first printing,
selling 300,000 copies in its first year, and over 1 mil-
lion by the end of the decade. The vast majority of
these copies were purchased in the North and overseas.
Influenced by her reading of slave narratives by
Frederick Douglass, Josiah Henson, and other former
slaves, and by her reading of abolitionist tracts, such as
Weld's Slavery As It Is (1839), Stowe depicted slavery
as an iniquitous institution that separated mothers
from children, husbands from wives, and generally
wreaked havoc on the black and white family. Through
her use of direct address, she attempted to make her
readers identify with the plight of the novel's embattled
slaves. Sharing the views of her sister, the well-known
domestic theorist Catharine Beecher, she depicted be-
nevolent white women as having the potential to regen-
erate America by wielding moral influence within the
home. But slavery ultimately proves to be insurmount-
Stowe, Harriet Beecher / 865
able for most of the women in the novel, in a world in
which slaveholders like Simon Legree have absolute
power to torture and kill their slaves, such as the
Christ-like martyr Uncle Tom. Clearly concerned about
the plight of the black slaves, Stowe's descriptions
nonetheless reveal that she followed the racialist think-
ing of the time in regarding blacks as essentially differ-
ent from whites (they are depicted as more passive and
domestic) and perhaps not even particularly well suited
for citizenship in the United States. The novel ends
with the major black characters either dead or choos-
ing to emigrate to Africa. Although Stowe's biblical ty-
pology suggests that the South can be regarded as the
land of Pharaoh, she hardly demonizes southerners:
Legree and several other of the novel's slaveholders are
former northerners, and slave trading is shown to yield
money for New York investors and thus to be part of a
national economy. Stowe's novel can be read as an at-
tack on capitalism and patriarchy as much as a specific
attack on the South. Overall, what most concerns
Stowe is the blasphemous nature of slavery, the way it
allows people to assume a God-like relationship to
other people. In the manner of a sermon, her novel
calls on all Americans to diminish their potential for
sinning by abolishing slavery.
Not surprisingly, response to Uncle Tom's Cabin in
the South was swift and furious, as numerous review-
ers assailed Stowe for what they regarded as her libel-
ous attacks on the South's cherished institutions. Ac-
cording to George F. Holmes, who reviewed the novel
in the October 1852 Southern Literary Messenger,
Stowe failed to see that it was precisely the institution
of slavery that was responsible for producing such a
perfect slave as Uncle Tom. In the July 1853 Southern
Quarterly Review, William Gilmore Simms was even
more vitriolic in his criticism of the novel, joining
Holmes in arguing that Uncle Tom's saintliness testified
to the positive value of slavery, and attacking Stowe
personally as a depraved individual (as evidenced by
the fact that she dared to write about sexual and politi-
cal matters). Simms also argued that it was unfair to
use the literary form of the novel, a fiction, to proffer
social criticism. Nevertheless, Simms and other south-
ern writers quickly concluded that the most effective
argument against the representation of the South in
Uncle Tom's Cabin would be to offer their own
counter-representations. The period thus saw the rise
of Anti-Uncle Tom literature, which included over
twenty novelistic responses, most notably Simms's
Woodcraft (1852), Mary H. Eastman's Aunt Phillis's
 866 / Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Cabin (1852), Maria J. McIntosh's The Lofty and the
Lowly (1853), Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's
Northern Bride (1854), and Thomas B. Thorpe's The
Master's House (1855), and also an important poetic
response, William J. Grayson's The Hireling and the
Slave (1856). These works generally portrayed benign
slave masters and contented slaves who thrived in the
familial, paternalistic framework of the plantation.
In A Key to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1853), Stowe's
documentary effort to authenticate her novel by adduc-
ing its sources in slave testimony, newspaper accounts,
legal trials, and the like, Stowe emphasized the dangers
of granting absolute power to the slave master, and she
warned of the hazards of developing a dissolute class
of poor whites unable to find work because of the exis-
tence of slavery. As opposed to her support for African
colonization in the final chapters of Uncle Tom's
Cabin, she concluded A Key with a vision of blacks be-
coming responsible U.S. citizens. She took up similar
themes in her second antislavery novel, Dred: A Tale of
the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), set in the Carolinas,
which depicts tyrannous white slave masters with un-
limited power, a drunken and racist white rabble that
offers its support to these masters, and a number of ac-
tive and intelligent white and black characters who are
committed to the cause of antislavery. The title charac-
ter, Dred, an escaped slave hiding out in the swamps
with other escaped slaves, was modeled on two impor-
tant black southern leaders: Denmark Vesey, who at-
tempted to lead a slave rebellion in Charleston, South
Carolina, in 1822; and Nat Turner, whose bloody slave
revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831 con-
tinued to haunt the white southern imagination.
Stowe's sympathetic embrace of Dred's revolutionism
marked a significant shift in her thinking and may have
spoken to her anger at the 1856 caning in Congress of
the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by the
South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks. The
southern response to Dred, a book far more critical of
the region than Uncle Tom's Cabin, was mostly a de-
termined silence, though in 1858 the Southern Literary
Messenger printed a review by an anonymous "Young
Lady of New England" that attacked the Beecher fam-
ily for its alleged history of immoral beliefs and ac-
tions.
From her Christian millennialist perspective, Stowe
regarded the Civil War as a holy war that promised to
redeem the United States by bringing about the end of
slavery. At the conclusion of the war, Stowe initially
maintained that Confederate leaders, whom she sus-
pected of masterminding Lincoln's assassination,
should be punished for their disloyalty. However, in-
fluenced by her brother Henry Ward Beecher, she
adopted a more moderate position on the importance
of (white) northerners working together with (white)
southerners to heal the nation. Her desire for sectional
unity led her to retreat somewhat from her support for
black elevation in the United States. Convinced that it
would be precipitous to give emancipated black men
the right to vote before they were better educated, she
initially opposed the adoption of the Fourteenth
Amendment. Shortly after the amendment's passage,
however, Stowe moved to Florida and began to publish
essays, eventually collected in Palmetto-Leaves (1873),
on the importance of improving blacks' economic op-
portunities in the South. She thought that southern
whites should participate in these efforts, and in 1869,
with the help of funds from British donors and the
Freedmen's Bureau, she founded what she hoped
would be an integrated school for black and white chil-
dren in Mandarin, Florida. But after running the
school for several months, she succumbed to local pres-
sure and segregated the classrooms.
Stowe's failure to develop an integrated school mir-
rored the failures of Reconstruction. With the return of
Jim Crow laws and the renewal of southern sectional
pride, many southerners continued to regard Uncle
Tom's Cabin with contempt. The late nineteenth and
early twentieth century saw a renewal of Anti-Uncle
Tom novels, the most notable examples being Thomas
Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898) and Thomas Dixon's
The Clansman (1905), which served as the literary
source for D. W. Griffith's seminal film The Birth of a
Nation (1915). A defense in part of the Ku Klux Klan,
Griffith's film was very much admired by at least one
prominent Virginian, Woodrow Wilson, who had writ-
ten in A History of the American People (1902) that
Uncle Tom's Cabin had not been true to the many posi-
tive aspects of slavery. In Life and Labor in the Old
South (1930), the influential southern historian Ulrich
B. Phillips similarly criticized Stowe for having exag-
gerated the evils of slavery.
According to Stowe's friend Annie Fields, who first
reported the anecdote in Life and Letters of Harriet
Beecher Stowe (1897), published a year after Stowe's
death, Abraham Lincoln remarked to Stowe during her
1862 visit to the White House: "So you are the little
lady who made this great war." She may not have actu-
ally "made" the war, but few writers have been more
influential in developing the iconic significance of

North and South and addressing the problem of slav-
ery and race in America.
Robert S. Levine
See also Abolition; Novel, 1820 to 1865; Plantation Fiction;
Women Writers, 1820 to 1900.
Elizabeth Ammons, ed., Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher
Stowe (1980); Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Mar-
golis, eds., The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on
Women's Rights and Woman's Sphere (1988); Thomas Gos-
sett, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and American Culture (1985); Joan
D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1994); E. Bruce
Kirkham, The Building of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1977); Rob-
ert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Poli-
tics of Representative Identity (1997); Ellen Moers, Harriet
Beecher Stowe and American Literature (1978); Eric J. Sund-
quist, ed., New Essays on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1986); Jane
Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of Ameri-
can Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985); Edmund Wilson, Patriotic
Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962); Forrest
Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher
Stowe (1941).
SUBURBS AND SUBURBAN LIFE
After World War II, southern farmers, like farmers in
other regions earlier, moved increasingly to the cities in
order to find jobs, recreation, and educational oppor-
tunities. By 1980, however, city dwellers had become
disillusioned with problems connected to urban life:
pollution, crime, traffic, and high cost of living. Like
northern cities, southern cities in the second half of the
twentieth century have experienced "white flight,"
leaving decaying, poor urban centers populated mostly
by minorities. The jobs and the white population
moved to the suburbs. One result was that schools that
had been desegregated by law in the 1960s became
again segregated by geography. In addition, southern
suburbs became attractive to the many retirees and
young educated professionals (yuppies) from the North
who headed south in search of a warmer climate and a
more relaxed way of life (particularly after the advent
of air-conditioning). The South by the 1970s earned
the descriptor "Sunbelt," an area encompassing Vir-
ginia through the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, and
across the Gulf states to the Southwest.
The suburbs-residential areas beyond "down-
town" limits of large cities-sprang up by taking over
farmland and drained money from urban infrastruc-
tures. The mass construction of new homes that
Suburbs and Suburban Life / 867
seemed indistinguishable from one another, as well as
the rise of strip malls and the migration of northerners
to these areas, has caused concern over the loss of a
unique southern culture, including language and litera-
ture. Traditionally, critics have defined "southern writ-
ing" through the works of such authors as William
Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and
Flannery O'Connor; their work, replete with southern
idiom, is concerned with southern history and its im-
pact on the family and draws upon the plantation or
small-town past. More recent writers, however, ex-
press an interest in the post-agrarian South, with its
urban and suburban landscapes and the influx of a na-
tionalized popular culture. At issue, then, becomes the
question of whether there remains a definable "south-
ern" style of literature.
The apparent lack of southern consciousness in the
writing of some post-1960s southern writers has chal-
lenged critics to redefine southern in relationship to na-
tional culture. Although Richard Ford was born in
Jackson, Mississippi, and spends part of his time in
New Orleans, only one of his works, A Piece of My
Heart (1974 ), takes place in the South. The Sports-
writer (1986), and its sequel, Independence Day
(1995), for example, take place in New Jersey suburbs,
New York City, Michigan, New Hampshire, Vermont,
and Florida. Ford's main character, Frank Bascombe,
enjoys the anonymity and comfort that suburban life
provides even though a sense of this anonymity carries
over into his personal relationships. Bobbie Ann Ma-
son's work describes the increasing suburban sprawl in
the South and the corresponding encroachment of pop-
ular culture. Her short stories and novels take place
mainly in Kentucky and show the influence of televi-
sion and popular music. "Graveyard Day," a represen-
tative story, explores the conjunction of impermanence
in modern society with the desire for family and a tra-
ditional way of life. In Country (1985) describes a
girl's attempt, in a changing South, to find her identity
through her ancestry; representations of her heritage
take the form of competing geographies, rural and sub-
urban. Anne Tyler, who grew up in Raleigh, North
Carolina, set her first three novels in the South, but the
rest of her work occurs in urban or suburban Balti-
more, a borderland between North and South. Works
such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) and
Breathing Lessons (1988) emphasize the complexity of
family relationships in anonymous, colorless city
neighborhoods.
Other contemporary writers have remained more
 868 / Suburbs and Suburban Life
specifically southern in their writing even while they
describe the changes taking place in the region. Jose-
phine Humphreys's novels Dreams of Sleep (1984) and
Rich in Love, (1987) take place in and around Charles-
ton. In Rich in Love, a teenage girl fights to keep her
family together in the face of changing expectations for
women and definitions of family. Although Lee Smith's
work mainly addresses Appalachian culture, such nov-
els as Family Linen (1985), Fair and Tender Ladies
(1988), and The Devil's Dream (1992) also describe
the conflict between the traditional Appalachian cul-
ture and a new suburban society. Jill McCorkle from
the small town of Lumberton, North Carolina, ad-
dresses similar issues in her writing; in Tending to Vir-
ginia (1987), for example, a southern woman faces
conflicts within herself and her family as she rises in so-
cial class and economic status and moves geographi-
cally from a small-town rural area to a more suburban
setting.
For African American writers, the differences be-
tween the Old South and the new, modern South can
signify the differences between races as well as social or
economic classes. For example, John Holman's Squab-
ble and Other Stories (1990) address the confrontation
of upwardly mobile African Americans with racial
prejudice, the differences between poor and middle-
class African Americans, and issues of heritage for Af-
rican American southerners. Marita Golden's "A
Woman's Place" (1997) explores the lives of a Muslim
couple who have achieved economic success and conse-
quently struggle with the meaning of happiness and the
importance of family.
Jennifer A. Haytock
See also Cities; K Mart Fiction.
Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping
American Values, Politics, and Culture (1996); William J. Coo-
per Jr. and Thomas E. Terrill, The American South: A History
(1991); Dewey W. Grantham, The South in Modern America:
A Region at Odds (1994); Fred Hobson, The Southern Writer
in the Postmodern World (1991); Jefferson Humphries and
John Lowe, eds., The Future of Southern Letters (1996); Linda
Tate, A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contempo-
rary South (1994).
SUNBELT
The term Sunbelt did not achieve widespread usage
until the 1970s, but the social and economic changes
that precipitated its coinage began with the post-
World War II transformation of the South. For many
years economically inferior to the industrialized North,
the South also battled a self-image as a racist, be-
nighted, poverty-stricken, rural region inhabited
largely by uneducated denizens who resisted change.
Several forces eroded this image, thereby granting the
region a face-lift, an improved identity as the Sunbelt,
land of opportunity and growth.
The 1930s and 1940s provided a context in which
the South's economy and population could diversify.
Hastened by the Great Depression and New Deal farm
policies, commercial agriculture in the South replaced
tenant farming and sharecropping. Industry also
boomed as the South became more urbanized. Crucial
to the South's urban growth was the influx of military
bases and defense industries. Advanced communica-
tion and transportation systems necessarily accompa-
nied this postwar transformation. Southern states
began to resemble their northern counterparts more
closely; both regions spawned shopping malls, fast-
food chains, and apartment complexes, linked together
by bypasses and interstates.
To encourage development, southern leaders lob-
bied for funding from the federal government, and
after the passage of civil rights and equal rights laws,
learned quickly that one way to insure their region's
economic growth was to make the South a place easily
inhabitable by whites, blacks, and women. In order to
attract and facilitate corporate and commercial invest-
ments, southern leaders also devoted themselves to im-
proving educational and technological facilities. Many
states marketed areas surrounding their state universi-
ties as prime locations for industrial parks. Cheaper
land, lower taxes, a minimal labor-union presence, and
enthusiastic leadership enticed northern industries and
workers to the South. The widespread availability of
air-conditioning was, of course, instrumental in draw-
ing people from other areas to the region, and such cli-
mate control further intensified the South's attraction
as a pleasant place to live year round.
Indeed, by the 1970s, Americans who lived outside
of the South began to be exposed to what might be
called an extensive public-relations campaign. In 1975
Kirkpatrick Sale, a Manhattan journalist, described an
area ranging from North Carolina to Southern Califor-
nia, what he called the "Southern Rim," as a region of
tremendous economic significance. In 1976 the New
York Times ran a series of articles all centered upon the
concept of the "Sunbelt South." The very flexibility of

the term Sunbelt and its connotations of optimism and
prosperity displaced less-complimentary associations
with the Confederacy, slavery, and ignorance. Maga-
zines such as Southern Living depicted a new breed of
upper-middle-class southerners who lived in lovely
homes, enjoyed their spacious gardens, and ate deli-
cious meals comprised of native southern bounty.
Meanwhile, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Barry
Hannah, and other writers populated their fiction with
characters bereft of family ties who identified them-
selves less by region and more by occupation (or lack
thereof), a cast of characters virtually rootless in
comparison to some of their southern literary predeces-
sors. Other writers such as Jill McCorkle, Anne Tyler,
Ernest Gaines, and Alice Walker continued to redefine
and modify old constructions of "community" and
"family."
The Sunbelt South, though vastly improved from its
earlier incarnation, did not rid itself entirely of rural
poverty or other problems that had long beset the re-
gion. Despite population and industrial growth, the
South, with the exception of a few states, lagged be-
hind the national average in terms of per-capita income
in the 1980s. Nonetheless, many changes successfully
wrought a highly visible image of the South as the Sun-
belt, a burgeoning region still ripe for dwelling and
tourism. In the 1990s, the South boasted another eco-
nomic boom made manifest by an increasing number
of jobs and an undeniable influence in national politics.
Elinor Ann Walker
See also Civil Rights Movement; New Deal; New South; Re-
gionalism; Sharecropping; Southern Living; Tenant Farming;
World War II.
Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping
American Values, Politics, and Culture (1996); Numan V. Bart-
ley, The New South, 1945-1980 (1995); Dewey W. Grantham,
The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (1994 ); Ray-
mond A. Mohl, ed., Searching for the Sunbelt: Historical Per-
spectives on a Region (1990); Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift:
The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern
Establishment (1975); Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to
Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the
Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (1991).
SUNDAY SCHOOL
The roots of the Sunday school go back to eighteenth-
century England, when Robert Raikes (1736-1811)
Sunday School / 869
had success in correcting lawless behavior of Glouces-
ter children on Sundays by engaging women teachers
to give instruction in reading and then catechism. The
experiment quickly spread to other parts of the country
and to Wales. In 1785 the Sunday School Society was
formed, followed in 1803 by the Sunday School Union.
In the United States during the nineteenth century,
for many Protestant congregations Sunday schools be-
came important in the church's configuration of its
mission. In denominations where the catechism tradi-
tion is not strong, the flavor became biblical and often
evangelical. Baptists and Methodists-the major de-
nominations in the South-had not accented cate-
chisms, and Sunday schools were their counterpart to
the training that Lutherans and Catholics might receive
in established catechisms. As Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly
knew, sending a child to Sunday school was an impor-
tant step in training a child in the way he should go.
Sunday schools have had their own evolution. At
first, the Bible was the primary text, but denominations
developed various aids to assist the teachers whom
they enlisted to instruct: illustrated tellings of the Bible
stories in simple language, and later quarterlies for
older children and adults; vibrant music accompanying
plenary sessions that opened and concluded a Sunday's
gathering. Creating Sunday school literature became
an important denominational responsibility. Sunday
school picnics were one device to make Sunday school
"fun."
In the twentieth century, fundamentalist Christians
have retained in their Sunday schools the biblical em-
phasis that mainline churches have replaced. Some
mainline churches have preferred the designation
"Church School"-distancing themselves from the fer-
vor of nineteenth-century Sunday schools. For Baptists
and Methodists, Sunday schools often became impor-
tant for adults as well as for children; parents were ad-
monished to take, not send, their children to Sunday
school. Sunday school was to be-and still sometimes
is-a habit for life, as the case of President Jimmy Car-
ter illustrates. In the twentieth century, Protestant
churches supplemented the efforts of their Sunday
schools by developing Vacation Bible Schools, which
usually run from one to two weeks during the summer.
Following the integration of public schools in the
1960s, fundamentalist churches in the South increas-
ingly developed Christian schools, which give religious
as well as academic instruction, providing the biblical
instruction that Sunday schools and church services
deemed sufficient in earlier times.
 870 / Sunday School
Although Sunday school has been part of the expe-
rience of many southerners, its portrayals in literature
have not been numerous. But a few have been memora-
ble. In his Narrative of the Li(e of Frederick Douglass
(1845), Frederick Douglass describes a Sabbath school
like that founded by Raikes, in that the teaching of
reading was central to the curriculum-and different
from what "Sunday school" usually conveys. A very
young Douglass was the teacher to a class that reached
over forty students. A decade later, Douglass wrote: "I
look back to those Sundays with an amount of pleasure
not to be expressed. They were great days to my soul.
The work of instructing my dear fellow-slaves was the
sweetest engagement with which I was ever blessed."
For his readers, Douglass was careful to use his ac-
count of the school for polemical purposes to an audi-
ence that knew Sunday school in other contexts:
"These dear souls came to Sabbath school not because
it was popular to do so, nor did I teach them because it
was reputable to be thus engaged." Douglass antici-
pates later satire of the Sunday school for the reputable
by Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt (1922).
Later, Sunday school would be useful for humor
and parody. In his "Story of a Bad Little Boy" (1865),
Mark Twain parodied Sunday school literature. Asam-
ple: "But the strangest thing that ever happened to Jim
was the time he went boating on Sunday, and didn't get
drowned, and that other time that he got caught out in
the storm when he was fishing on Sunday, and didn't
get struck by lightning. Why, you might look, and
look, all through the Sunday-School books from now
till next Christmas, and you would never come across
anything like this."
In one of the most successful episodes of The Ad-
ventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Twain captured the
Sunday school experience from the boy's point of view.
The episode underscores the importance of memory of
biblical texts as a goal of the mid-nineteenth-century
Sunday school and Tom's failure to produce the knowl-
edge he pretends to have. The scene also reveals that
the Sunday school contest has become a device to pro-
duce loyalty and enthusiasm. For Tom and the other
children, the Sunday school is mainly a social event-
made bearable because so many of the children he
knows are present. Although Tom embarrasses himself
on the particular Sunday that Twain shows, the setting
becomes the scene of a later triumph when Tom is able
to observe his own funeral from the balcony.
In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Tom's
irreverence toward Sunday school is caught early when
he and his "gang" seek to rob "a parcel of Spanish
merchants and rich A-rabs"-disrupting what in real-
ity is a group of young children on a Sunday school pic-
nic. How much Sunday school Huck might have had to
endure while living with the Widow Douglas is unclear,
but Twain shows her sister Miss Watson attempting to
correct the deficiencies of Huck's religious education.
In the twentieth century, Thomas Wolfe in Look
Homeward, Angel (1929) described with irony and
some affection the Presbyterian Sunday school and its
effect on his protagonist. But not many memorable de-
pictions of Sunday school have come from the South.
As noted, midwesterner Sinclair Lewis mocked the lib-
eral Sunday school experience in Babbitt. Late in the
century, John Irving from the Northeast made Sunday
school scenes an important element in A Prayer for
Owen Meany (1989), a work that has resonated with
many southerners. Satire and humor are not the main
thrust of Irving's depiction, as they are with Twain and
Lewis.
Joseph M. Flora
See also Bible; Bible Belt.
Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, Vol. II:
Reformation to the Present (Rev. ed; 1975); Sally G. McMillen,
To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White
Churches, 1865-1915 (2002).
 T
TALK (GOSSIP)
To understand how talk is so important to southern lit-
erature, one need only listen to Eudora Welty as she ex-
plains the origin of her fiction in the classic One Writ-
er's Beginnings (1983). Early in life, she spent a great
many hours listening to talk all around her; so much so
that when it was in danger of not occurring, she cajoled
it into surrounding her once more. Sitting in the back-
seat of their car between her mother and a neighbor,
she would remind them as they began their outing,
"Now talk." She continues, "Long before I wrote sto-
ries, I listened for stories. Listening for them is some-
thing more acute than listening to them .... Listening
children know stories are there. When their elders sit
and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one
to come out, like a mouse from its hole." Russell Baker,
in his memoir Growing Up (1982), describes his own
similar experience as listening "for talk ... that had
gone on for years." Elders who talk and children who
listen are (or were in the days before television and
video) indigenous to any region of the country, it's
true. But whereas talk in other regions exists to inform,
to instill, to connect, and to maintain, talk in the South
is also a cultural feat of ordering-the world is or-
dered, history is ordered, one's daily life is ordered
through the telling and re-telling of what happened. It
is not enough to have witnessed an event and recount
the facts of it; it's the story of the event that matters.
Telling the next version of it simply brings it into the
reality of people's lives, puts it in perspective, makes it
palatable, or at least comprehensible, no matter how
lurid or cruel. There is comfort in the sounds of women
talking over her cradle that Kaye Gibbons's narrator
remembers so vividly in A Cure for Dreams (1991).
There is cruelty in the women's stories that Harry
Crews remembers in A Childhood: The Biography of
a Place (1978)-women's stories, he says, particularly
871
scare him; unmitigated by humor, they tell the truth
about things that others hide. There is, on the other
hand, unmitigated pleasantness in the tales of Mrs. Jo-
lene B. Newhouse, of Lee Smith's small story "Between
the Lines" (Cakewalk, 1970), a small- (very small)
town columnist who reorganizes the news to, as she
calls it, "uplift my readers if at all possible." For exam-
ple, once she was through with it, a news item might
read, "Mrs. Alma Goodnight is enjoying a pleasant re-
cuperation period in the lovely, modern Walker Moun-
tain Community Hospital while she is sorely missed by
her loved ones at home." Jolene explains, however, "I
do not write that Alma Goodnight is in the hospital be-
cause her husband hit her up the side with a rake and
left a straight line of bloody little holes going from her
waist to her armpit after she yelled at him, which Lord
knows she did all the time, once too often." Does she
lie?
No, says Welty. Lying is not the point of embellish-
ing a story. The point is to imagine it as it fits the land-
scape of our lives. Hence her character Laurel's frustra-
tion with the funeral talk in The Optimist's Daughter
(1972); as story after story comes out about her father,
as he lies in his coffin immune and yet vulnerable to it
all, she protests that they misrepresent him-he was
never any of those things, she believes, and is insulted
to find others exaggerating or mixing his life up with
someone else's, someone they wished he would be, or
wished, at least, themselves to be. Southern talkers do
get as carried away by the telling as a listener (or
reader) will be; for evidence, Welty refers us to her own
"Why I Live at the P.O." (A Curtain of Green, 1935)
as the beginning of a long canon of stories in which the
first-person narrator is overtaken by her own words,
the most poignant example being Miss Katie Rainey
throughout The Golden Apples (1949), the most hu-
morous Edna Earle Ponder of The Ponder Heart
(1953).
 872 / Talk (Gossip)
On the other hand, silence, the absence of talk, is a
danger to culture. Think of Faulkner's silent ones-
Abner Snopes in "Barn Burning" (1939), his few words
more lethal than his acts. Think of Carson McCullers's
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), built around the
wordless powers of two mutes and the impact they
have on people who talk, talk, talk-as one of the
mutes, Mr. Singer, thinks-but never communicate a
thing except their own obsessions. For there is talk,
and then there is talk. In the first, words rattle like the
empty bones of a dead carcass; in the second, words re-
sound like the lessons to your whole life-they come
back to you over and over again when you seem most
in need of their advice, and mean differently depending
on age and wisdom and what you are ready to accept.
One southern character remembers her mother sitting
at the table-her husband inches from a psychiatric
breakdown, her daughters in peril of their identities-
carrying on a whole evening's talk by herself; she
thought it her duty to keep conversation from lapsing.
Lee Smith's Oral History (1983) has an interesting
variation of this as its theme. Naively, a young student
agrees to look into the carefully kept silence about her
forebears for her teacher, a folk historian. What she
finds (the little) and what she does not find (the vol-
umes that come out in silence) make up a bizarre his-
tory of people whose private sorrows and successes
will never really be known by anyone, especially this
sheltered child. But the privileged reader hears chapters
of voice after voice, each rich in its interior remem-
brances, that tell eavesdroppers everything. The aca-
demics may call it "oral history," but everyone else
knows it as just talk.
Rachel V. Mills
See also Oral History; Storytelling.
TALL TALE
The tall tale might be defined as a lie, told initially as
truth, but with an escalating pile-up of preposterous
details until it has reached the point of incredulity-in
effect, an extended practical joke. The teller usually
treats it as an anecdote about something that has hap-
pened to him or to someone he knows-all the while
keeping a straight face. Ideally, the listener, at first in-
nocent, becomes slowly aware that he is being taken in,
but goes along with the often elaborate set-up, and
ends up laughing at both the story and his own gullibil-
ity. Anyone who has lived in a rural area, particularly
in the South, has been a victim, willing or not, of this
type of storytelling.
The tall tale, throughout its long history, has most
often recounted exploits in uncharted territory, as
when Othello tells Desdemona of a far-off place where
there are "men whose heads/Do grow beneath their
shoulders," and Gulliver records his adventures in the
land of the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians.
America, of course, became the ultimate unknown
territory with its vast sweep of wilderness, and the tall-
tale hero quickly found a place in its literature. At first
the rustic defender of American democracy against the
foppish Britisher, he became, as the country moved
westward, the rough-hewn backwoodsman, "tough as
hickory and long-winded as a nor'wester." Along the
Ohio River, Mike Fink could ride a moose as if it were
a horse and drown an attacking she-wolf by holding it
under water. In Kentucky, Davy Crockett could tie to-
gether the tails of two buffalo, build a fire by scraping
his knuckles across flint, and "put a rifle-ball through
the moon." The exploits of both, as well as those of
other frontiersmen, gained wide acceptance through al-
manacs, stories in magazines, newspapers, anthologies,
and "autobiographies," one of which was written by
Crockett himself.
From the 1830s to the Civil War, this rough and
rugged frontiersman was brought to earth and changed
into a ne'er-do-well who lived not by his physical
prowess but by his wits. He was set to political purpose
by the Old Southwest humorists, who used him to
argue against Andrew Jackson and the extension of
suffrage by laying out for the reading public what they
saw as the savagery of those who were acquiring the
right to vote. Longstreet's Ramsey Sniffle, for example,
goads his fellow backwoodsmen into fights in which
they tear off each other's noses, ears, and bits of cheek.
Johnson Hooper's Simon Suggs believes that "one
should live as merrily and as comfortably as possible at
the expense of others." And George Washington Har-
ris's Sut Lovingood sets out to inflict pain on others as
a way of vengeance for the near-starvation of his child-
hood. During the war, Harris created broadly satirical
portraits of Lincoln as a cowardly idiot, at one point
comparing him to a dead frog stretched out of shape.
One of the most famous of the tall tales, "The Big
Bear of Arkansas" (1841) by Thomas Bangs Thorpe,
introduces the character Jim Doggett, from Shirt-tail
Bend, who, aboard a steamboat, tells his citified audi-