THE NEW WRITERS OF THE SOUTH
Edited by Charles East
Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987
296 pp., $25.00
"There was a South of slavery and secession--that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom--that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour." Thus, Atlanta editor/journalist Henry W. Grady opened one of the famous speeches in American history. "The New South" was delivered in 1886 in New York City. It arose from the pains and humiliations of Reconstruction and was delivered to the New England Society, a group of important northern financiers and public figures. Grady's speech was a well-crafted plea for a reconciliation between North and South and for economic support to develop a new region fashioned after the image of its industrialized neighbor. The bitterness of the Civil War had been largely forgotten, he said, though Grady acknowledged that some people still thought General Sherman was "a kind of careless man about fire." The South under Reconstruction had "fallen in love with work" and had even "learned that one northern immigrant is worth fifty foreigners." However ironic the description of carpetbaggers, Grady's message was clear: The future would be shared, and "American."
But historically southerners have proven to be nothing if not stubborn. Having lost the military conflict and been forced back into the Union, the region dragged its heels when asked to march in step toward a future it had just sought to avoid. Political strains, social and racial conditions, economic realities, and just plain old, ingrained cultural conservatism conspired to keep the South a region apart--almost an exotic foreign land to other Americans. As late as the Great Depression of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt could still describe the region, with some accuracy, as "the nation's No. 1 economic problem," in effect a national liability.
Much has changed now, of course. The South has accepted the future, if not always the present; industry flourishes; cities such as Atlanta and Memphis, for better or worse, seem more and more like New York and Chicago; even regional accents are losing their exotic tang under the assault of network television and the influx of northern business. One can drive through the South today, as through any other region, keeping entirely to the interstate highway network and not passing through a town, sleeping and eating only in Howard Johnsons or Holiday Inns (home office, Memphis) and eating food frozen, packaged, and sent from other regions of the country.
There is still a South, of course, but it often hides itself cleverly and must be sought out. The old, popular image of the South has turned into the Sunbelt. The region that had been distinguished, if not isolated, by its culture and peculiar history is increasingly a matter of memory, literature, and myth. But if to be "southern" is as much a state of mind as a geographical location, then its flavor should best be seen through its literature, which traditionally serves as the soul of a given culture.
A new 'New South'
All of this is by way of approaching an anthology of recent fiction, The New Writers of the South, a collection edited by Charles East that begs to be
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