[In the following essay, Turner comments on the diversity of the American South, and on the need for further study of lesser Southern authors of the post-Civil War period.]

It would be possible, I suppose, to speak of the American South and mean only a portion of the globe bounded by such and such coordinates of longitude and latitude. I sometimes say to a class or seminar in southern literature that the course owes its existence and its bounds to convenience only—that world literature, or American literature, cannot be studied in one piece, and that southern literature is a plausible unit for separate study. But the students realize soon, if not at once, that it is impossible, of course, to speak of the South, southern literature, or the society for the study of southern literature without meaning far more than a direction, or an area on a cartographer's grid. Literary works in particular are likely to be enshrouded in human and social implications, and literary discourse can be at best only an exercise in describing surfaces if it ignores the complex of forces that shape the mind and imagination of the author and determine the context in which the work is written. A comparable truncation or distortion or superficiality may result if the discourse moves to the opposite extreme and considers only the external, the public elements of the context. Not even Emily Dickinson's poems—and surely not Sidney Lanier's—can be extracted from the world that entered the poet's awareness, however restricted that world may have been. Nor can the works of Upton Sinclair or George W. Cable be read as no more than briefs in the social debates of their times.

Just as literary authors exist in a composite of time and place and attitudes and tastes, so do literary scholars and interpreters. Literary historians interpret and in a sense join their readers in recreating the literary past. The literary past thus formed will not have the same appearance it had in that past time or in any other time. We read, report, interpret, and evaluate earlier southern literature by our lights, and no one needs to be told that our lights today are not what they were five years ago. Literary historians of a future time will read the literary history and interpretation we write just as they read the novels and poems and plays of our contemporaries—will read them all as reflections of our time, and will judge them by their lights, not ours. That is to say that the literary history and criticism we compose today, no less than works in the main genres written at any time, is determined in large measure by the context from which it derives. The determining ingredient in the context for one work may be a view of man and God and the universe; or it may be for another work as minute and literal as the circumstances of publication. If you do not see what I mean by the second possibility, think of a reviewer in the SAMLA Bulletin or an alumni bulletin evaluating a book written by a friend of his—compare such a review as his with one written for the Times Literary Supplement of London, and published anonymously of course, not by such a magisterial British reviewer as would be assumed, but instead by an American scholar assessing an American book, or in the instance I have in mind, a gathering of American books, dealing with a controversial subject on which he has published firm convictions of his own.

It is not my intention, let me hasten to say, to remain in such generalities as these, but rather to leave the theoretical for the practical, after this reminder that any reference to southern literature implies an identifiable and a definable and presumably an understandable South, and further that literary study derives from its context no less, or at least little less significantly, than does literary composition. My main purpose is to touch on several matters of practical importance in such a study of southern literature as we concern ourselves with, and to indicate areas that seem to invite exploration and clarification.

For one thing, there are many souths, not one; and in some respects the differences among those souths are of greater consequence than the similarities. In the early South, regional identification was not prominent. Just as Americans anywhere found it difficult in the first decades of the new nation to put national allegiance above state allegiance, so the residents of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and also the newer states, apparently, were slow to acknowledge southern loyalties as distinct from state loyalties, even as sectional tensions increased before 1860, and even though the dimensions of the South, geographical and otherwise, were then much smaller than they would be later in the century. The Civil War yoked together, violently and in violence, it can be said, widely divergent regions and peoples. In a sense that would have been inappropriate before the war, Edward King, in criss-crossing the former Confederate States in 1873, could report on them as an entity in the “Great South” papers he published in the Scribner's Monthly first and separately afterward. He acknowledged the diversity of land and life in the region, but writing in the shadow of secession and the war and in the presence of the issues bequeathed to the new era, he wrote about one south, the Great South, a Paradise Lost, he said in his opening sentence, which might or might not become a Paradise Regained. Those issues, centering on the former slaves as citizens, so dominated southern history long after 1865 that a degree of unity could be assumed for the region.

Even so, there has been uncertainty at the edges, clearly apparent in the border states. And does the South start at the Chesapeake Bay or at the Potomac River; does it extend to the Mississippi River, or the Sabine, or the Colorado that divides East from West Texas, or the Pecos River? El Paso and Amarillo are cities in one of the Confederate States. What I want to suggest is the need to keep in mind the immense diversity within the South when we frame generalizations and sift for qualities that can be called essential and pervasive. I might suggest further that in view of the importance slavery and race (in their infinite ramifications) had in giving the South its identity and its distinctiveness, we must remain alert to the changes that may evolve as the issues related to race cease to be mainly southern and the prospect grows more likely that the seat of racial prejudice and the battleground for citizens' rights will shift out of the South.

Diversity in geography, climate, land, population, and means of livelihood is greater, surely, and culturally more significant in the South than in other sections of the country. It may be that Scottish, Italian, and Czech immigrants, together with the other nationalities that came in smaller numbers—it may be that in the South such immigrants took much the same route to naturalization and assimilation as elsewhere in America. But the French, Spanish, and Germans came in such numbers, represented each such a wide spectrum of society, and maintained—even close to the present time—their national and cultural identities so persistently that they require more than a passing reference in southern literary history. They became Americans with widely varying degrees of eagerness or reluctance, but in keeping alive the languages, the lore, and the traditions of their fatherlands, they all contributed variety and richness by their presence alone. We know them as subject matter in the local color writing of the 1880s and in the regional fiction of the 1930s. We are aware that much of their cultural history can be drawn from the many native-language newspapers they published. Such an awareness may be adequate for the German communities in Louisiana and Texas (the German Coast above New Orleans, for example, Fredericksburg, New Braunfels, Weimar, and Umbarger in Texas); it is less adequate for the Spanish, dating back to the earliest settlements and distributed from Florida to Texas—and of course on to California. Such an awareness is far from adequate for the French, who formed significant cultural islands in Charleston, Mobile, and elsewhere, and for almost two centuries maintained in New Orleans a full-round Latin civilization. The Creoles of New Orleans gave the opera and the drama their first significant beginnings in America; they maintained perhaps closer ties to current literature in their European fatherland than did any other segment of the American population; their newspapers during much of the nineteenth century found remarkably large space for literature and literary comment. The long history of the French-language newspaper in New Orleans, L'Abeille—The Bee, illustrates the in-and-out relations of the two peoples of the city—during part of its history, the paper was published in French only; in other parts it published parallel (but not always identical) French and English sections.

Charles Gayarré and Alcée Fortier were historians primarily, but both had considerable presence in literary quarters (Fortier was president of the Modern Language Association in 1898). George W. Cable and Lafcadio Hearn were fascinated students of the history, language, and lore of the Creoles. Edward Larocque Tinker in a later period was an earnest student of French Louisiana, as were also, to a degree, the novelists Roark Bradford and Lyle Saxon. Even so, the cultural history of French New Orleans is more remote from most of us than that of France. I am not sure the French Louisianians wanted to encourage les Américains—often the hated Américains—to explore their literary history any more than in the decades following the Purchase they relished the thought of losing their identity in the melting pot they saw the new nation to be. Literary history can learn a good deal from a full account of Gayarré's long life. (He was a dramatist and novelist.) By chance the half dozen or more letters William Gilmore Simms wrote to Gayarré, located at Tulane University, did not get into the edition of Simms letters, but no doubt they will be in a supplementary volume.

There is much more to be learned from the career of Grace King. An edition of her best stories would help, and a full biography would reveal much about the Creole-American relations in Louisiana, including literary relations, in the time of Cable and Hearn, Kate Chopin and Ruth McEnery Stuart. (An unpublished dissertation on Mrs. Stuart written at L.S.U. brings together the basic facts of her life and work.) Grace King's friendship with Mark Twain, Howells, and others both in America and abroad can tell us more than we know about the literary lines from one remote region to the main literary centers. Someone needs to study in detail the portraits of Louisiana French characters drawn by Grace King, Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, and others, alongside the Creoles and the Cajuns of Cable's stories and novels. Such a study is invited by the Creole dissatisfaction with Cable's fiction when it appeared and by Grace King's avowal that her initial purpose in writing was to correct Cable's portraits. The apparent inconsistency in her published comments on Cable might be cleared away.

Let me mention in this connection one or two possibilities in what I suppose is the sociology of literature. In the early 1880s, George W. Cable visited in Cajun country, the prairie and bayou region west of the Mississippi, learning the speech and recording facts and observations and impressions for the benefit of the fiction he intended to write. His chief informant was Madame Sidonie de la Houssaye of Franklin, whom he asked from time to time to verify details in his stories. From her he had also some of the materials he put into the volume Strange True Stories of Louisiana. She was a writer herself, more devoted and determined than successful with the long romances, in French, employing but little from her abundant knowledge of the people Cable hoped to portray with accuracy and realism. Here would be evidence, if more were needed, on the contrasting views in the 1880s and 1890s as to the proper materials of fiction.

The fictional portrayal of the Creoles and the Cajuns suggests an aspect of all local color and regional writings that I believe needs more study—the relation of the author to his subjects. Some of the Creoles wrote in the newspapers vouching for the fidelity of Cable's Creole portraits. He had grown up among the Creoles and had warm friendships among them; he studied them in history and in his daily associations. Yet, he was an outsider, for all his knowledge, sympathy, and presumed understanding. Thad St. Martin, a physician in Houma, a town in southwest Louisiana, wrote Madame Toussaint's Wedding Day, a novel set among the simple Cajun folk on Bayou Louvered. The work stood its own among the regional novels of the 1930s. When I met Dr. St. Martin once in Houma, he wanted to make sure that I not take him to be one of the Cajuns he had written about; he was a Creole, and he liked to spin yarns about those odd people, who were his patients, and whom he valued and loved. If one of his patients had possessed the ability to write about his own people, would he have written about Madame Toussaint, and the same kind of book Dr. St. Martin wrote? If he had, would the book have been one to please the readers of regional novels in the 1930s?

The same questions might be asked, I suppose, about other local or regional authors. Mary Noailles Murfree knew her Tennessee mountaineers from the summers she and her family spent in the mountains. O. Henry probably knew the mountaineers of his stories at no closer range. Jesse Stuart may be a good author to consider in this connection. A study of his works might suggest that in some regards and in subtle ways he has written as an outsider, his heritage and his residence in his native W-Hollow notwithstanding.

Members of one race drawing literary characters of another race are of course legion in southern literature and offer complex problems of interpretation and assessment. From Poe, Simms, and Kennedy to Irvin Russell, Thomas Nelson Page, Ellen Glasgow, Margaret Mitchell, Roark Bradford, and perhaps Eudora Welty, many authors have introduced Negro characters without giving the problem many troublesome variables. In the works of Joel Chandler Harris, Mark Twain, or William Faulkner, the complexity may derive mainly from confusion or uncertainty or changes in the author's mind. Such variations in the works of Negro authors have reflected additional complications: the paucity of models for such writings as their purposes might dictate, and the exigencies of being published and read in a literary world in some degree alien. The slave narratives had other purposes than character delineation, as did such writings as those of Mrs. Frances Harper and others of the war period. The career of Charles W. Chesnutt is especially useful, I suspect, for the light it throws on the racial aspects of authorship in the decades following the Civil War. He resided in both South and North; he had sponsors among white authors of the time, including Cable; he submitted his stories to magazine editors at a time when they were growing reluctant to publish anything on the southern problem or the race question. With him, furthermore, characters of the two races presented separate but inseparable problems. Back of him, few members of his race had written stories or novels dealing with either race. As others present can say with more assurance than I, the debate over William Styron's Nat Turner has raised—perhaps has exacerbated and confused would be a better way to put it—the question as to whether a white author can portray a black satisfactorily (or the reverse, I suppose), or whether the attempt is even worth making. The contentions on this point seem to be more heated than logical. My only thoughts are that after a century or more in which aspects of race were in effect off limits for many authors, similar prohibitions dictated from a different quarter may have no better warrant. And further, we do not as a rule take our poets and novelists and dramatists to be promulgators of absolutes, to give us final words on the questions they raise. Don't we, rather, expect from them exploration, suggestion, speculation—the kind of insights and imaginative syntheses, under the spur of skeptical probing, which may aid finally to answer social, human, and moral questions?

We need to know more—and more of the subtleties—about southern authors in their relations to editors and publishers outside the region—and inside also. The discovery of Cable by Edward King and the editors of Scribner's Monthly has been told many times; the first national publication of works by Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Mary Noailles Murfree, Ellen Glasgow, and others have been recounted also. But there are other instances that may fill out our understanding. Within a few weeks after the surrender at Appomattox John Esten Cooke was publishing in New York the first in a series of biographical, historical, and fictional accounts based on his experiences as a Confederate officer. William Gilmore Simms was publishing in New York almost as promptly. Was it true, as has been said, that in the 1880s, and again in the 1930s, a southern book was easier to place with a New York publisher than a book from any other section? What were the results when editors and publishers outside the South urged southern writers (as they urged George W. Cable and Thomas Nelson Page) to give them romantic tales of the idealized Old South rather than the fiction of a different type they preferred to write? In the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s some of the magazine editors in New York were ready to tell authors in the South what kind of fiction they would publish. One would like to know how generally such was the practice and what were the consequences, then—and in later times as well.

Let me name two areas where study is needed and where encouragement or exhortation may be required, or where there must be joint effort of the kind that a cooperative association might sponsor. I mean the study of lesser authors and lesser genres. There will be no shortage of new readings of “Ligeia” or “A Rose for Emily” or “Good Country People,” or new evaluations of Huck Finn's decision to “go to hell, then,” or new identifications of fertility symbols in Faulkner. Some of the lesser writers and lesser works are unexciting, to say the least. But if anyone is to read them and report on them, we homefolks will probably have to do it. William Tappan Thompson, Richard Malcolm Johnston, and Charles Henry Smith (alias Bill Arp) do not stand very tall in the era of Mark Twain, James, and Howells; but they continued to write well into that era, and in many ways that may be significant they brought the tradition of backwoods humor over from the 1840s and 1850s and at least helped prepare readers for the humor of Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, and William Faulkner. We can speak with more assurance at this point when we have good biographies of these three men.

Literary history cannot chart only the highest peaks of achievement and let them stand as isolated, unexplained phenomena, like mountain summits above an expanse of clouds. The highest mountains grow from the lesser mountains around them and lean on them—to expand the same figure—and at times shifts in the supporting earth alter the relative or the absolute heights of the mountains. Herein lies a lesser but perhaps a sufficient justification for studying authors of the second or third or fourth rank.

Let me interject here a collateral question that may be worth exploring: How do we account for the number of books on southern literature published early in the present century? A list would include Southern Writers, by W. M. Baskervill and others, 1897 and 1902; S. A. Link, Pioneers of Southern Literature, 1899; C. W. Kent, The Revival of Interest in Southern Letters, 1900; Carl Holliday, A History of Southern Literature, 1906; Mildred L. Rutherford, The South in History and Literature, 1907; Kate Orgain, Southern Authors in Poetry and Prose, 1908; the section on literature in The South in the Building of the Nation, 1909; the seventeen volumes of The Library of Southern Literature, 1909 and afterward; and Montrose J. Moses, The Literature of the South, 1910. F. P. Gaines's The Southern Plantation, 1924, might be added, and also C. Alphonso Smith's Southern Literary Studies, 1927. Likewise the list might be extended backward to include a number of magazine articles published between 1880 and 1900; and possibly also the volumes of southern poetry, mainly war poetry, published after the Civil War, including one by Simms. It is worth noting also that Simms proposed soon after the close of the war to publish a multivolume series of southern authors. With a few exceptions these works do not contribute much to an understanding of southern literature; but they constitute something of a phenomenon and might be described and evaluated in a chapter on southern literary historiography in this period, comparable to the account of southern historiography published by Wendell H. Stephenson some years ago.

Along with literary history, strictly defined, attention might be given also to biography and autobiography and to letters and letter writing. We cannot expect other editions of letters to fill out and deepen our knowledge of literary history as much as the five volumes of Simms's letters have done, but the letters of Paul Hamilton Hayne already published suggest that a selection drawn from the total of Hayne's correspondence—if publishing the total is not feasible—that a generous selection would be invaluable to a study of the southern literary scene from the founding of Russell's Magazine, say, to Hayne's death in 1886. Couldn't much the same be said about the letters of John Esten Cooke and Thomas Nelson Page? And don't we need new biographies of Cooke and Page?

The literature of a new country or region particularly aware of its distinctiveness, or aware of a changing or uncertain status, is likely to be self-conscious. Such was true, surely, of writers for two or three generations after the American Revolution. Such self-consciousness is a handicap generally, until authors arrive on the scene with the talents and the independence of mind to escape the dominion of the local and the immediate and to bend those elements to their special literary purpose. Is it possible, I wonder, to observe in William Gilmore Simms the occurrence and the effects of a regional self-consciousness superseding an earlier national self-consciousness? No author in the South during the forty or fifty years after the Civil War could forget that he was a southerner, even though he might avoid the deprivations and pressures and prohibitions that generally prevailed. Hayne, Cable, Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and Walter Hines Page come to mind. And of course Charles W. Chesnutt, for no Negro author in the South then—or today perhaps—could escape multiplied and disturbing forces on his pen. Mark Twain and Ellen Glasgow may have dominated their regional materials, partially at least, by achieving something of a literal distance and more of a figurative distance. But they escaped a hobbling self-consciousness only part of the time, as was probably true of William Faulkner also, and Thomas Wolfe. To my mind Eudora Welty is an author who has escaped or nearly escaped the limiting self-consciousness I have been talking about. She is as much at home in her region as the wisteria in her yard, and it is not easy to imagine her anywhere else—for long. Yet she sits aplomb, as Whitman might have said, self-assured and unperturbed. In those ways that are observable, Miss Welty has been as conscious of her region, as much bound up with it, I suspect, as any other of our authors. But the evidence is preponderant that she has remained serenely mistress of her own artistic destiny, that with her a full measure of self-consciousness—a full awareness, I would rather say—has been a major asset. What I want to suggest is that in nothing the forces that have come to bear on southern authors, forces from inside the region or outside, exerted through the facts of publishing or in other ways—we must remain alert to the individual and subtle responses of each author to those forces. Thus, it seems to me, we will understand better the individual author and also the literary scene in its full spread and continuum; and we can hope not to mute the distinctive overtones of a literary work, however much it and its author belong to a particular time and place.