SOURCE: Ridgely, J. V. “The New South: The Past Recaptured.” In Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature, pp. 89-111. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1980.

In the following essay, Ridgely presents an overview of Southern literature between 1879 and 1899, emphasizing major figures and works in the era of local color.

The South's strong resistance during Reconstruction to a complete reordering of its way of life was less valorous than its wartime performance, but it was more successful. As the scars of occupation faded, its writers embarked upon a popular program of sectional justification that would have astonished the editors of scores of dead little southern journals. For northern editors were now not merely tolerating writing from the South; they were demanding it. And they not only sought it; they bought it. This episode in American literature is usually called the emergence of the “local color” school. Not only the South was involved...