SOURCE: Thompson, G. R. “Edgar Allan Poe and the Writers of the Old South.” In Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott, pp. 262-77. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Thompson contrasts the typically regional focus of nineteenth-century Southern writers with that of Edgar Allan Poe, whose work consistently transcends the literary tropes and stereotypes of his contemporaries.

One of the most striking features of Southern literature is the contrast between writing of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century and that of the long preceding era. Before the war between the states, despite a powerful cultural construct informed by mythic significance, only one major national writer, Edgar Allan Poe, emerged from the “Old South.” This judgment is not merely a modern one. Antebellum Southern magazinists and publishers continually decried the dearth of Southern literature compared with that of the North...