THE radical need of the Southerner to explain and interpret the South is an old and prevalent condition, characteristic of Southern writers since the 1830's and 40's when the region first became acutely self-conscious. The rage to explain is understandable, even inevitable, given the South's peculiar place in the nation—the poor, defeated, guilt-ridden member, as C. Vann Woodward has written, of a prosperous, victorious, and successful family. The Southerner, that is, more than other Americans has felt he had something to explain, to justify, to defend, or to affirm. If apologist for the Southern way, he has felt driven to answer the misstatements and accusations of outsiders and to clarify the image of the benighted and savage South. If native critic, he likely has been preoccupied with Southern racial sin and guilt, with the burden of the Southern past—and frustrated by the closed nature of Southern society itself, by that quality which suppressed dissent and adverse comment. I omit for the moment the Southern novelist, and even the black Southerner—who more than anyone else possessed and has been entitled to possess a rage to explain the South. I mean, rather, those white Southerners—some journalists, some teachers, some writers of no exact description—who have felt strongly about the South and have written books expressing their feelings. The apologists number Southerners from George Fitzhugh and Edmund Ruffin through Robert Lewis Dabney to Donald Davidson; the critics, Southerners from Hinton Rowan Helper to W. J. Cash and Lillian Smith. It would be to oversimplify to say that the apologists, after 1865, belong to a