SOURCE: Voss, Arthur. “Local Color and Western Humor,” and “The Regional Story in New England, the South, and the Middle West.” In The American Short Story: A Critical Survey, pp. 70-113. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973.

In the following essay, Voss provides an overview of regional and local color stories set in the West, East, South, and Midwest.

Although Washington Irving gave “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and some of his other tales with American settings a pronounced regional flavor, there were only a few other writers before the Civil War who, in anything more than incidental fashion, followed him in his primary concern with depicting those aspects of the speech, dress, mannerisms, customs, and geographical setting that were peculiar to a particular locality or region of the country. In what was to be the phenomenal development after the war of this kind of story—often called the...