SOURCE: Cash, W. J. “Of the Frontier the Yankee Made.” In The Mind of the South, pp. 141-44. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941.

In the following excerpt, Cash recounts the birth of a new literature in the Reconstruction South.

There is one curious and apparently paradoxical fact here which must be considered … I mean the fact that it was in [the post-Civil War] period that the South began at last to have a literature—or at least that it began to have a number of people who devoted themselves to the writing and publishing of novels, stories and sketches, and poetry.

But the actual amount of paradox involved is very small. Set Sidney Lanier to one side, say of him that, though he was both derivative and didactic, he was probably as authentically a poet as any other American of his time, Walt Whitman alone excepted; and we...