SOURCE: Rubin, Louis D. Jr. “Southern Writing, 1865-1920: Introduction.” In Southern Writing, 1585-1920, edited by Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 635-46. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1970.

In the following essay, Rubin surveys Southern literature of the post-Reconstruction period, concentrating on the local color movement, literary depictions of blacks, and the state of poetry.

In 1873, Scribner's Monthly sent the journalist Edward King southward to prepare a series of articles for its readers, describing the people and scenes of a region which, its editors said, was “almost as little known to the Northern States of the Union as it is to England.” While in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, King met a young cotton exchange clerk and sometime journalist, George W. Cable, who showed him a story he had written. Impressed, King took it back to New York with him, and soon...