THOMAS Wolfe and the South was the subject of the first essay on Southern literature I published, almost a quarter-century ago. In that essay I went about demonstrating, or attempting to demonstrate, that Wolfe was indubitably a Southern writer, as if that were of itself a kind of badge of literary honor, and to prove it I drew up a list of characteristics customarily ascribed to Southern writers and tried to show how each applied to Wolfe's writing. These included such things as the fondness for rhetoric, the sense of place, the storytelling quality and the sense of the family that is supposed to go along with it, the consciousness of the past and of time, the sense of evil, and so forth. I came to dislike that essay very much, and the next time I had occasion to revise and augment the set of essays on contemporary Southern literature in which it appeared I scrapped it and got my friend and Chapel Hill colleague. C. Hugh Holman to write one instead. He did so, and more to my satisfaction. My early essay, however, remains available; every so often somebody discovers it, and I am always embarrassed to see it quoted. I have not wavered at all in my conviction that Wolfe is a Southern writer, but I don't think that lining up a set of the official characteristics of Southern literature and then trying to show that Wolfe fits them and so is eligible for the prized blue ribbon—or should I say blue-and-gray ribbon—is very helpful either in understanding Wolfe or Southern literature. It is something like trying to prove that a great batter like Ted Williams was a good baseball player because he