SOURCE: Holman, C. Hugh. “Southern Writing, 1800-1865: Introduction.” In Southern Writing, 1585-1920, edited by Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 309-13. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1970.

In the following excerpt, Holman stresses the economic and cultural grounds for the dearth of accomplished Southern literature during the years 1800 to 1865, seeing Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod as the only professional writers of merit in the Old South and Poe as its only artist of genius.

To understand the literature produced in the South between 1800 and 1865, it is important to keep certain characteristics of the region and its people in mind, and to remember that the standard monolithic view of the South was late in forming and was always a concept imposed upon an actuality that it never fitted well.

Since the eighteenth century, there had been at least two distinct...