Everybody—well, almost everybody—is willing to concede that there is such a thing as Southern literature, by which is meant that which, when present in a work of imaginative writing, links that work with the particular region of the United States known as the South. Moreover it does this not merely geographically, or historically, but in the sense that the imaginative dimensions of the work, the versions of human experience that it images, take the shape that they do because of the relationship.

We make this assumption, and we have ample reason to make it, but when it comes down to identifying what the element or elements that make the work of literature "Southern" are, we are by no means certain. Not only do the answers vary widely, but our responses tend to become involved with all manner of political, social, cultural, and even theological allegiances, and too often what ought to be a matter of descriptive analysis becomes an assertion of value.

I have spent a considerable amount of time during the past four decades or so attempting to skirt the issue of exactly what the "Southern" quality in Southern literature might be. Phrased like that, the particular question can be counted upon to make me want to draw back. In recent years I have even taken to announcing, whenever a newspaper reporter or a radio or television person wants to interview me, that the one question I will not attempt to answer is, "what is "Southern" in Southern literature?"