SOURCE: Jacobs, Robert D. “Tobacco Road: Lowlife and the Comic Tradition.” In The American South: Portrait of a Culture, edited by Louis D. Rubin Jr., pp. 206-26. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

In the following essay, Jacobs underscores the crucial role of the figure of the poor white male in Southwestern humor fiction.

Gaunt, racked with ague, dull-eyed and hollow-cheeked, he has been with us in fiction for more than two hundred years. Until recently travelers through the South could see his real-life counterpart leaning against the doorframe of a paintless, screenless shack on the edge of a cotton field in Georgia, South Carolina, or Mississippi, or sitting on the porch of a perilous hillside shanty in eastern Kentucky with tin cans and the rusted hulks of abandoned cars in his grassless yard. In the more than two centuries of his literary history, the southern poor white...