George Washington Cable was the most significant Southern writer in the crucial years from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the first decades of the twentieth century. When he was born in New Orleans in 1844, Walden (1854) and Moby-Dick (1851) were not yet written. When he died in Florida in 1925, Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920) and Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) had been published, and Hemingway was working on The Sun Also Rises (1926). Cable was lauded as the successor to Hawthorne, and lived to negotiate the motion-picture rights for some of his stories. Cable was a major participant with Mark Twain and William Dean Howells in widening the scope of realism in fiction, and he is a focal point for critics and literary historians who continue to debate the nature of the Southern literary imagination. He wrote about a host of social issues (the convict lease system, corruption in state government...