Conflict, exoticism, sensuality, eccentricity, and the sheer differences of the American South pervade this lively anthology, the first in fifty years to focus exclusively on the nineteenth-century tradition of southern local color. Its thirty-one stories, spanning the 1870s through the early 1900s, represent some of the best southern fiction to appear during the great flowering of American local color writing.

The fifteen authors included here are those most admired by their contemporaries. Modern readers may recognize Kate Chopin, author of "The Awakening"; Charles Chesnutt, the...