SOURCE: “‘Reading a Small History in a Universal Light’: Doris Betts, Clyde Edgerton, and the Triumph of True Regionalism,” in Pembroke Magazine, No. 23, 1991, pp. 59–67.

In the following essay, McFee considers Betts a regional author whose stories have a universal appeal.

“The best American fiction,” said Flannery O'Connor in “The Regional Writer” almost 30 years ago, “has always been regional. The ascendancy passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed to and stayed longest wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light. In these things the South still has a degree of advantage. It is a slight degree and getting slighter, but it is a degree of kind as well as of intensity, and it is enough to feed great literature if our people—whether they be newcomers or...