Fifty years ago next month—in November 1930—a symposium was published by twelve Southern writers who called themselves Agrarians. The symposium was entitled I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, and among those contributing papers were John Crowe Ransom, Alien Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Appearing in the depths of the Great Depression, I'll Take My Stand urged Southerners to favor agriculture over industrialization, to forsake the prophets of progress, and to return to their alleged aristocratic heritage. Since aristocrats did not exactly abound in the South of 1931—a South plagued by pellagra, poverty, and prejudice—the Agrarians were denounced in many quarters, including the pages of VQR. Writing in the January 1931 issue, Gerald W. Johnson, a fellow Southerner, castigated Ransom, Tate, Warren & Co., observing that "the twelve should turn to agrarianism as a remedy would seem to indicate that their sole knowledge of the South has been gleaned from the pages of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page." If a half century ago the Agrarian vision seemed to many like Johnson more hopelessly romantic than harshly realistic, then what possible relevance could it have for the South today—a region changing as rapidly as the next shopping center is built and the next six-lane highway put through. That question is examined by Lucinda Mac Kethan. She is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University and the author of The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature, a study of post-Civil War Southern writers recently published by LSU Press.

While the Agrarians employed prose to discuss the South, photography served as a principal medium for two later books on the region during the Depression years. One, published in 1937, was Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell's You Have Seen Their Faces. The other, now acclaimed as a classic, was Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee felt that the camera was "the central instrument of our time." How that instrument was employed, respectively, by Evans and Bourke-White is the subject of Carol Shloss' article. Ms. Shloss teaches English at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Flannery O"Conner's Dark Comedies: The Limits of Inference, a work which LSU Press is publishing this month.