In 1917 when H. L. Mencken belittled the South as -almost as sterile artistically, intellectually and culturally as the Sahara Desert, - he set off a reaction that is still reverberating today. The first issue of The Double Dealer out of New Orleans in 1921 pronounced it -high time, we believe, for some doughty clear-visioned penmen to emerge from the sodden marshes of Southern literature.- Hundreds did.
Supplanting the romantic novelists of the Old South, the new Southern fiction writer displayed an enormous diversity of interest and daring technique. Indeed, Southern fiction...