SOURCE: Rubin, Louis D. Jr. “Southern Writing, 1865-1920: Introduction.” In Southern Writing, 1585-1920, edited by Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 635-46. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1970.

[In the following essay, Rubin surveys Southern literature of the post-Reconstruction period, concentrating on the local color movement, literary depictions of blacks, and the state of poetry.]

In 1873, Scribner's Monthly sent the journalist Edward King southward to prepare a series of articles for its readers, describing the people and scenes of a region which, its editors said, was “almost as little known to the Northern States of the Union as it is to England.” While in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, King met a young cotton exchange clerk and sometime journalist, George W. Cable, who showed him a story he had written. Impressed, King took it back to New York with him, and soon Cable sent him another. The second story, “'Sieur George,” was accepted by Scribner's and published in October, 1873. With its publication there was launched, for all intents and purposes, the southern local color movement. Soon Cable's lead was being followed by others, and the national magazines were filled with southern material. Along with Cable, such resident southern writers as Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Richard Malcolm Johnston, Mary Noailles Murfree, Sherwood Bonner, James Lane Allen, and others won national prominence. Page's faithful Negro retainers and Harris's Uncle Remus replaced the image of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom in the popular imagination as the embodiment of the southern black man. Mark Twain, at first seemingly a western tall-tale humorist, began producing his great fiction—work deeply drawn out of the southern experience and very much in the local color genre even while transcending it. By 1888, the onetime Abolitionist Albion W. Tourgee could write in vexation that “not only is the epoch of the war the favorite field of American fiction today, but the Confederate soldier is the popular hero. Our literature has become not only Southern in type but distinctly Confederate in sympathy.”

Now that the southern writer was free from the self-imposed obligation to rally to the defense of slavery, he was at liberty to develop and examine conflicts within his society, and to reveal its inner nature through them. It soon turned out that insofar as the southern writer was able to take advantage of such freedom, what he produced was often much more successful as sectional justification than literature which had ignored the existence of such conflict. The tremendous impact of Thomas Nelson Page's idealization of the Old South, and its implied defense of the South's post-Reconstruction racial attitudes and policies, was possible in part because he could display and then resolve a division of loyalties within the society. By depicting a secessionist as a hothead, Page could make the Unionist hero of his influential “Marse Chan” into a powerfully-rendered testimonial to southern aristocratic wisdom and virtue. His fictional eulogies of the Old South, with their fond portrayal of master-slave relationships, were far more effective as propaganda than all the labored attempts of the prewar southern patriots to counter the strictures of Harriet Beecher Stowe by describing a slaveholding society without flaw or blemish.

Much of the success of southern letters in the later years of the nineteenth century can also be attributed to the fact that, where in the prewar period rising sectional tensions had militated against acceptance by the northern reading public of any sympathetic depiction of southern society, conditions in the 1870's and thereafter were such as to work almost equally as powerfully in favor of just such acceptance. The odd ways, quaint customs, and variant character types of the far-flung American regions might now be savored with pleasure; a South whose deviation from the national norm no longer constituted a threat to political union might at last be enjoyed for the ways in which its life-styles differed from those of the Northeast. At the same time, now that the fight was over and tempers were receding, factors of kinship and union reasserted themselves. Thus both regional differences and regional similarities operated, during the decades following the Civil War, to make the sections of the United States interested in each other. A literature, therefore, which could show the variety and diversity of cultures and institutions available to Americans within their common country, and also demonstrate that underneath the surface differences there was an essential kinship of attitude and belief, was very much in demand. This was what the southern literature of local color provided.

And the South was different—it contained a variety of subcultures and subregions of fascinating surface complexity. There was Old Virginia with its once-proud plantations, Tidewater Carolina with its rice fields and its mysterious swamplands festooned with trailing Spanish Moss, the flat, semitropical lowlands of Florida, the remote mountain fastnesses of the Appalachians with their rugged, primitive, and often violent ways, the vast cottonfields of the Deep South, the languorous, sultry Creole society of New Orleans, the picturesque Cajuns of the Louisiana bayous. No standardized region, the South. In addition, there now existed the romantic potentialities of a genuine Lost Cause—so very and so satisfactorily Lost, as both sides now agreed. Such a heritage of defeated valor could be most enthusiastically exploited.

Then, too, there was present in the South, as almost nowhere else in the nation, the black man—some four million Negroes, most of them former slaves. The war had freed the slaves, and had also marked the virtual end of the Abolition movement. The crusading zeal of the foes of slavery, the fervent resolve that “as He died to make men holy, we shall die to make men free,” had been dissipated in the waste and carnage of Civil War. The experiment of Reconstruction had been a failure, or so it now seemed to most northerners. There had been enough bloodshed and suffering on the black man's account; it was time to leave him alone, let him make his own way if he were capable of doing so, and get on with the nation's business. The Negro was the South's problem, not the nation's.

The literature of southern local color, through its depiction of the Negro, was admirably tailored to reinforce such a position. The typical Negro as presented in local-color literature was utterly devoted to his “quality” white superiors (and contemptuous of poor-white trash), improvident but cheerful, ignorant yet wise in folkways, fervently religious but comically superstitious, faithful unto death to his white folks even though a trifle careless of the rights of property when it came to stray chickens or watermelons, essentially goodhearted, and benevolent. In short, he was a happy peasant, content to exist in a condition of inferiority provided that his material wants were attended to, and best treated with gentle understanding and affection. He must be humored in his foibles, not held to the same standards of behavior, honesty, and probity that would be expected of white men, and by no means entrusted with the responsibilities of full citizenship (which he didn't really want, anyway).

To leave so childlike, so improvident a creature to the care of his former owners, who, after all, knew him best, was no doubt the best solution—or so the literature of local color (with a few notable exceptions, to be sure) assured the northern reading public. This was exactly what strife-weary Americans wished to read. Thus by presenting the former slave as a docile and devoted child, southern local-color literature helped importantly to reunite North and South and to dispel any lingering feelings of guilt and resentment. And as for those black men who did not conform to the childlike peasant stereotype, and who insisted upon the right to vote and to speak out, they were shown as “uppity,” as brute animals apeing human behavior, who deserved to be suppressed.

In addition to all these factors, there was yet another advantage that accrued to the southern writer of the post-Reconstruction years. For he was writing, for the most part, of a rural and small-town society, essentially preindustrial, simple in its tastes and elemental in its virtues and vices, with a homogenous population, very much a settled community, religious and church-going, with a defined system of caste and with deference paid to the best families, and generally leisured in the pace of its daily life. His stories, however, were written for and read by the citizenry of a country which was, save in the defeated South and certain enclaves of the North and West, increasingly an affair of cities, dominated by the industrialism that the needs of war had vastly intensified, and faced for the first time with all the vexing problems of the modern industrial world. With the Gilded Age, America had entered upon a new kind of society, and one that in its strangeness seemed infinitely less simple and less spiritually satisfying. The dynamics of nostalgia operated powerfully upon the consciousness of a society only a generation removed from the farm and the village. It was reassuring to read of areas still remaining in the nation in which society was simple, great wealth unknown, a man was an individual and not a statistic, and people still lived, thought, and died in terms of the old verities.

Freed of the onus of slavery, therefore, the South could serve as nostalgic solace and pastoral rebuke to the urbanized North. The Confederate heritage, only recently the symbol of treason and rebellion, took on a glamor and a romance that would have astounded a passionate secessionist of ante-bellum days such as Beverley Tucker, had he lived to witness it. Southern war memories, in the form of the Lost Cause, caught at the heartstrings of American readers. Reconciliation became the order of the day. The fiction writers, led by Page, capitalized on the vogue, with story after story in which Union officers of good family saved the old plantation from greedy carpetbaggers and knavish scalawags, saw and understood the southern side of the matter, proposed to the proud southern belle and, after giving proof of ideological soundness, was accepted and lived happily ever after in reconstructed bliss. The formula that John W. DeForest had used in Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, in which it was the southern girl who changed her opinions, was thus totally reversed, and for good.

Northern magazines and northern editors asked of the southern postwar writer only that he praise reconciliation and not disturb old wounds. Though he must not seek to justify secession, he could testify to the abundant good intentions and pure motives of those who had seceded. He need not in any way apologize for the Lost Cause, provided he agreed that now that it was lost, he was glad the Union had been preserved. With these restrictions, the columns of the national magazines were open to the South to tell its story.

It was a time when such magazines were attaining mass circulations of previously unheard-of proportions. An urbanizing America had produced a vast middle-class audience with leisure to read and a desire to be educated and uplifted. A new kind of “quality” magazine evolved, very much geared to popular tastes, copiously illustrated, offering fiction and nonfiction in almost equal proportions, and with one or more novels serialized from issue to issue. Scribner's Monthly, renamed The Century in 1880, became the most successful of these magazines. Its editor, Richard Watson Gilder, delighted in sectional reconciliation and the discovery of new southern authors. He published Cable, Page, Harris, Sidney Lanier, Hayne, Irwin Russell, Richard Malcolm Johnston, Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, James Lane Allen, Harry Stillwell Edwards, and others.

With mass circulation, however, came certain responsibilities. Dependent as such magazines were on popular acceptance, they could not afford to offend or antagonize many readers. The reading public of the day was predominantly feminine, and the editors of magazines were careful to publish nothing that might embarrass the most tender of sensibilities. The 1870's, 1880's, and 1890's were the era of the Genteel Tradition in American letters. The waning idealism of an earlier day was joined to the sentimentality and prudishness of a new middle class greatly coveting refinement and respectability to produce a literary ethos in which anything smacking of coarseness, ugliness, overt sensuality, or debauchery was rigorously excised. What this meant for southern literature was that the new-found opportunity to look realistically at southern society, now that the defense of slavery was no longer a factor, remained considerably tempered by a prohibition against the inclusion of any very distressful subject matter. The first of the local colorists to begin publishing in the mass magazines, Cable, ran into this prohibition from the start. His first story, “Bibi,” the account of an enslaved African prince who was brutally punished and mutilated, was rejected. On another occasion his editor, Gilder of The Century, advised him to “write something intensely interesting—but without the terrible suggestion you so often make use of.”

The taboo on unpleasant material, one must add at once, was by no means resented by most southern authors, who were generally in sympathy with the ideals of the Genteel Tradition and were, as writers, determinedly idealistic themselves. Like his northern and western counterparts, the southern writer of the period was largely unfamiliar with the harsher surfaces that marked the work of European realism and naturalism. The literature he produced, viewed in retrospect, suffered exceedingly from this deprivation. For it was unable to image large areas of southern experience, much of which was hardly composed exclusively of the sweetness and light that constitutes so much of the fiction of local color. The defeated South knew poverty and misery that hung on for decades. Led by the eloquent and inspirational Henry W. Grady of the Atlanta Constitution, the South resolved to change from an agricultural, one-crop, backward society into a New South, a bustling, business-minded, industrializing region of prosperous cities and towns. But despite much brave talk, most southern cities remained small, and the one-crop system, tenant farming, and inadequate marketing facilities kept most of the rural South in bondage.

Yet very little indeed of this experience is discoverable in the novels and stories that southerners were writing; for the most part the literature of local color told of a land where life was a pastoral idyl, and villages and towns were simple, tranquil communities in which God-fearing folk led lives of quiet satisfaction. Little of the spirit of critical realism, which in the North and West was producing the beginnings of a literature that would expose for scrutiny the actual conditions of American life, was present in the southern writers. Though the local-color genre encouraged particularized description of the details of experience, coupled with it was a reliance upon romantic plotting and on techniques of characterization that emphasized quaint types and did not encourage deepened psychological portrayal.

In the work of the best of the southern writers of the time, of course, such limitations could be transcended. Clemens, by far the greatest, built his best fiction on the recreation of his earlier rural and village experience, but the delineation of life in town and farm and the display of quaint character types abruptly deepened into mordant satire and, at key points, savage denunciation. In Adventures of Tom Sawyer, nostalgia and remorse joined to produce an account of a small boy imaginatively engaged in a humorous but urgent battle against the mundane circumstance of village life, while in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the falseness and pettiness of society in the towns and farms along the great river are progressively exposed to view in the course of a young white outcast's and a Negro slave's developing quest for freedom. Writing from the North, without fear of offending southern racial views, the transplanted southerner who called himself Mark Twain took up the issue of the violated humanity of the black man in a compelling portrait of a runaway slave. Though Jim exhibits many of the accustomed clichés involved in the depiction of the Negro in local-color fiction, he emerged as a human being possessed of stature and dignity that give the lie to any justification of his servile status.

George W. Cable, too, sought to use the local-color genre for purposes of social criticism; “I meant,” he wrote, “to make The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called.” Into his depiction of romantic Creoles and exotic New Orleans ways he introduced a vigorous denunciation of racial injustice. In his later work he broke away from the trappings of local color and strove to confront the economic, social, and racial issues facing southern society even more directly, though he was never able to escape from the romantic plotting and sentimental characterization of the local-color genre. Cable's insights into the nature of racial injustice has given his work renewed importance during our own time.

Time has not dealt as gently with the writings of Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus stories earned him widespread fame during his lifetime. Nowadays the tales of the curious adventures of Brer Rabbit and the other inhabitants of the southern countryside back in the days when the creatures could talk have receded in popularity, while Harris's picture of the kindly old black man who recounted them has been seen as the embodiment of the local-color stereotype of the childlike, docile “uncle,” content with his inferior status. No doubt the Negro dialect in which the tales are told, which in the 1880's and the decades following constituted one of their foremost charms, has proved a detriment to their ultimate popularity, for readers of a later day have little patience for the difficulties of reading dialect. Yet it seems unlikely that the Uncle Remus tales are headed for oblivion. There is too much fine humor in them, and it may well be, too, that objections to Uncle Remus as an example of racial stereotyping are too facile. For it is the rabbit, not Remus, who is the hero of the stories, and the manner in which, living in a world populated by bears, wolves, and foxes and with only his wits and his ability to dissemble to protect him, he slyly and zestfully outwits his more puissant foes, is more than a little suggestive of the black man's situation in a society controlled and dominated by white men. Of the Negro, Harris himself declared that “it needs no scientific imagination to show why he selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox.” It was not that Harris, associate of Henry W. Grady and editorial writer for the Atlanta Constitution, consciously dissented from the racial views of his time and place, but rather that through an instinctive identification with the underdog, the sympathetic insight of his artistic imagination may have helped him to transcend as an artist the assumptions bequeathed him by his society.

Toward the close of the heyday of local-color writing, The Atlantic published Charles Chesnutt's “The Goophered Grapevine.” Not until later was it revealed that the author was a Negro. Thus appeared upon the American literary scene the first important fiction to be composed by a black writer. Chesnutt's early stories were squarely within the local-color tradition, but in later writing he took up the situation of the black man more directly and explored, in novels that draw much closer to protest literature, his plight in a society predicated upon white supremacy.

Another southern Negro writer, James Weldon Johnson, also began publishing poetry at about the same time. In 1912, he published a provocative novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Johnson also won fame as a writer of songs for Broadway musical comedy. In 1919, with a poem entitled “The Creation,” an imaginative recreation of an old-time Negro preacher's sermon, he achieved an important language breakthrough for future black literature. Thus, while other and perhaps better authors than Chesnutt or Johnson might come later, here already was ample evidence that the black writer was capable of producing work that could hold its own in the company of white literature. Another dimension was thus added to the southern literary scene, while the presence of such articulate voices was a harbinger of change for the monolithic structure of almost total racial segregation that marked southern life of the period. The change would yet be awhile in coming, but Chesnutt and Johnson swiftly gave evidence that the southern Negro would not forever acquiesce in a system that kept him disfranchised, poorly educated, and impoverished.

Of the leading southern writers of the late nineteenth century, it was Clemens, Cable, and Harris who wrote most memorably of the Negro in the South. Harris alone of the three remained a southern resident throughout his life. Significantly, it is only in the fiction of the other two that overt criticism is registered of southern racial practices. For though the southern writer no longer had to tailor his work to the defense of slavery, it was another matter entirely to attack the racial status quo. This was not condoned; any writer who ventured such criticism was branded a traitor selling out his birthright for northern gold.

If there was little room in the southern aesthetic for the kind of critical realism William Dean Howells was espousing in the columns of Harper's Magazine, whether dealing with questions of race or other aspects of society, there was none at all for the bleak literary naturalism that Crane, Norris, and Dreiser began introducing during the 1890's and the early 1900's. In general, literary naturalism was an affair of cities; tenements, not tenant farms, were its milieu. And southern life was not yet importantly dominated by an urban consciousness. The towns and villages of the region were still essentially orthodox in religious attitudes; what Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and others had to say about the descent of man and the survival of the fittest made few inroads upon southern theological doctrine before the turn of the century. The southern writer of the period, still very much a part of his society, was not often tempted toward the obloquy and ostracism that any rigorous depiction of the harshness and inequities of regional life would surely bring about. Thus, when the vogue for local-color writing began to wane in the 1890's, it was to the historical costume-romance that the southern author most often turned. Such novels as Mary Johnson's To Have and To Hold and Prisoners of Hope, with their colorful dramatizations of heroic Virginians of colonial times engaged in exciting adventures, proved enormously popular.

Not until Ellen Glasgow's third novel, The Voice of the People, in 1900, did a southern writer other than Cable and Clemens begin a serious critical examination of the premises of regional life and regional society. This young Virginia woman had read her Darwin and her Herbert Spencer, she had read the French naturalists, and now she began bringing to bear the insights of biological science and social determinism to the experience of her region. In a series of novels, she set out in the 1900's and 1910's to produce an extended critique of the various phases of Virginia society, past and present. Few were the aspects of Old Dominion life that Ellen Glasgow did not touch upon. “Realism,” wrote Stuart Sherman later, “crossed the Potomac twenty-five years ago going North.” But though a handful of others, notably Will Harben of Georgia, sought to follow her lead, the modes of critical realism and naturalism remained basically uncongenial to the southern literary temperament, and only after the First World War would southern writers engage in any important dissection of the lower depths of southern society.

It is this temperamental incompatibility that helps to account for what most critics agree is the pervading lack of vitality in southern writing during the first two decades of the twentieth century. At a time when critical realism and naturalism were the dominant modes of discovery in American fiction, and when American opinion, prompted by the muckraking journalists, was engaged in an intensive, reformist scrutiny of the discrepancy between national ideals and the realities of actual conditions of everyday life, the southern literary impulse was at a low ebb, seemingly unable to draw nourishment and creative impetus from the chief literary currents of the time. It was not that the desire for reform was completely absent from the southern scene, or that southerners were not beginning to perceive the nature and the extent of the ills that afflicted their society—though it is true that the immense presence of the racial status quo lay as a pall over any efforts toward reform. Rather, it would appear that the view of the nature of man, and the attitude toward society and the relationship of the individual within it, that went along with critical realism and naturalism were essentially foreign to the southern literary imagination. For the southern temperament would seem, in the twentieth century as well as the nineteenth, to involve an attitude toward human life and experience that is basically religious in nature (though not necessarily sectarian). It has not envisioned the human being as ultimately an environmental product, and has been unable to view social conditions as the primary determinant of human conduct. Though in southern literature man is usually inextricably and properly involved in society, he is not, finally, defined by property, caste, or political status. Thus for the southern writer, the kind of bare, unornamented scientific searching out and delineation of environmental actualities, with the accompanying suspicion of any high-sounding evocation of moral absolutes, that both critical realism and naturalism seemed to demand, was not a congenial creative mode. To use Hawthorne's terms, not the Novel, with its “very minute fidelity … to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience,” but the Romance, with its affinity for the Marvellous and its license to “bring out or mellow the limits and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture,” would seem to be the fictional form most hospitable to the southern imagination. And thus it would not be until the 1920's, when fashions changed and environmental emphases yielded to a more cosmic consideration of man's potentialities and necessities, that southern fiction began emerging from the comatose state it had been in since the waning of the local-color movement. Then it was that Faulkner, Wolfe, and a host of other southern writers began producing fiction of new significance. And, despite her achievements of the 1900's and 1910's, Ellen Glasgow's most lasting work would appear to be that composed in later years, when she turned to the novel of manners.

There remains to note the condition of southern poetry during the half-century between the end of the Civil War and the coming of the First World War. Not only in the South, but in American poetry as a whole, the decades that followed the Civil War were a period of low poetic yield. In the South, of the poets who had shown such incipient promise in the years just before 1861, only Paul Hamilton Hayne survived into the post-Reconstruction period. But though Hayne wrote much verse, enjoyed a measure of acclaim, and though his struggle against poverty during those dreary years was heroic enough, he never attained to the first rank among poets, and very little of his verse retains interest for readers of a later day. So steeped is his work in the ideality and abstraction of the period, and so little imbued is his language with concrete specificity of detail, that the modern reader finds it verbally unexciting and sentimental.

The leading southern poet of the period, by all odds, was Sidney Lanier. His best work possesses what Hayne's lacked: enough richness and concreteness of language to give definite, evocative form to what is being described. Yet even Lanier's poetry is vitiated by an overreliance upon lofty ideas for its structure and meaning, and though rich and even lush, his language is commonly imprecise. Like most southern poets before and since, Lanier was insistent upon the importance of sound in poetry; in his book The Science of English Verse he sought to substitute a system of musical stress for the traditional metrics of poetry in English. Much of whatever connotative richness Lanier's language possesses is due to this insistence. In his best poem, “The Marshes of Glynn,” he succeeded in weaving a suggestive texture of language and atmosphere to embody his vision of the coastal marshland of South Georgia. But along with the concentration on tonal effects went a carelessness of meaning; he was all too willing to choose a word for its sound without reference to its sense, and even his best lines are often rendered vague and fuzzy.

Why, one may wonder, did poetry fare so poorly, when southern fiction was experiencing a resurgence? A plausible explanation may be that the reliance upon abstract ideality that governed the language of American poetry of the day served to bar the southern poets of the period from any real participation in the vitality of the local-color movement, grounded as the latter was on detailed observation of local particularities. Through his concentration on sound, Lanier came closest to a language that allowed for concrete particularity. One need only compare “The Marshes of Glynn” to a poem such as Hayne's “Aspects of the Pines” to realize how abstract and generalized is the language of the poetry of ideality, and how much more poorly adapted to the description of place. Not only might Hayne's South Georgia pine trees be growing almost anywhere else in the world, but they could as easily be poplars, cypresses, tulips, or any other tall trees.

A form of local color that did realize itself in poetry was dialect poetry. Beginning with Irwin Russell's “Christmas Night in the Quarters” and Thomas Nelson Page's “Uncle Gabe's White Folks,” there was a flood of southern poetry written in Negro dialect. Though it continued to be produced well into the new century, almost nothing of lasting literary value was accomplished in the medium, for the obvious reason that the built-in limitations of such an overly simplified approach to language precluded either verbal complexity or subtlety of thought. The best of it is little more than truisms made to seem like folk wisdom by being expressed in primitive language. When black poets such as James Weldon Johnson and the Ohioan Paul Lawrence Dunbar turned automatically to dialect poetry in order to image black experience, they too came immediately up against its limitations. Dunbar's sole alternative was to try to make use of the ornate diction of the poetry of ideality. Much of Johnson's early verse is in this form too, but with the composition of “The Creation,” as previously noted, he achieved what proved to be a crucial discovery for black poetry, in his demonstration that the cadences of Negro experience could best be rendered through diction and choice of imagery rather than through dialect distortion.

The fin de siecle poetry of the English Decadents possessed considerable appeal as a model for some southern poets during the early decades of the new century. The world weariness, aestheticism, and pagan attitudinizing of such English poets as Dowson, Wilde, Johnson, and others found echo in the work of Madison Cawein, Cale Young Rice, William Alexander Percy, and the early John Gould Fletcher. Fletcher went on to England, where he discovered imagism, and subsequently played a useful role in the revitalization of the language of poetry in English that came with the 1910's. But it was not until after the First World War that either he or Percy turned to the southern scene for subject and metaphor, and then they were speedily eclipsed by the young Fugitives of Nashville. As for the kind of poetry that the Chicago poets—Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay—began publishing in the 1910's, with its matter-of-fact diction that often approached the condition of prose and its affinity for strident social commentary, that seemed to hold no attraction whatever for southern poets, in part perhaps for the same reason that critical realism and naturalism did not appeal to the prose writers.

Poetry in the South, like fiction, had come upon lean days in the 1910's and 1920's. When H. L. Mencken, in his famous castigation of southern cultural aridity, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” declared that “down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician,” he did not exaggerate. Poets in number there would soon be in the South, and novelists in even greater number; in the decade to come they would begin appearing in undreamed-of profusion. But as the South, now once again fully a part of the American Union, prepared to play its role in the nation's venture into the Second World War, its writers were still waiting in the wings.