Along with the idea of the Great American Novel, the notion of America as a Melting Pot has passed out of fashion, the both because of the increasing futility of imposing homogeneity on a complex, ethnically and regionally diverse culture. Ironically, to the extent that the Melting Pot has failed, American literature has been the richer: ours is a pluralistic society, and likewise a disjunctive one, where the uniformity of language and political institutions masks a rich diversity of variations. The English language as spoken by the American Black, the American Jew, the American Yankee, the American New Yorker, the American Texan (whether Anglo or Chicano) is decidedly a different tongue, each a product of particular influences, whether the importation of European and African cadences and inflections or the growth and evolution of local mannerisms.

Where American authors for the most part before the Civil War tended to subsume regional coloration into European literary models—to such a large extent that one of the greatest of our writers created a Yankee whaling captain who seems more an escapee from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus than a native of Nantucket—after the war, with the rise of realism, American authors turned to the exploitation of regional distinctions. "Local color" is not an Americanism, but it is in terms of literature a national characteristic, and no region in this country has been more productive of colorful locales than has the South. Notably, the one dominantly regional school of writing that flourished before the Civil War was Southwestern Humor,