SOURCE: Page, Thomas Nelson. “Authorship in the South Before the War.” In The Old South: Essays Social and Political, pp. 57-92. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892.

In the following essay, Page discusses the paucity of a truly Southern literature prior to the Civil War and summarizes the principal Southern novelists, short story writers, and poets of the antebellum period.

Discussion of Southern literature during the period which preceded the late war naturally resolves itself into a consideration of the causes which retarded its growth, since the absence of a literature at the South during a period so prolific in intellectual energy of a different kind, is one of the notable conditions of a civilization which was as remarkable in many respects as any that has existed in modern times.

The object of this paper is to set forth the probable causes which conduced to this absence of literature...