In an earlier generation, an anthology of Southern literature might have pictured on its cover a decaying antebellum mansion, its avenue of rusty cedars overgrown with wild honeysuckle, slave cabins falling into ruin in the background. On the cover of the new Norton anthology called The Literature of the American South, we see Nell Choate Jones’s attractive 1946 painting “Georgia Red Clay.”[1] Two large trees tower over a modest bungalow, past the front gate of which curves a red-dirt road. Plowed fields stretch to the horizon. Down the road, in the distance, one can just make out the back or side of a larger residence, probably the “big house.”

Someone has chosen the cover art carefully, because this anthology sets out to efface the classic literature written—largely in this century—by white Southerners, and to replace it with a new, “revisionary” version whose underlying assumption seems to be that our interest in the South begins and ends with slavery and race relations. The results are unfortunate for readers with an interest in literature, since the white South —spurred by the defeat of its armies in 1865, and challenged by the subsequent destruction of its economy and culture—has produced in the twentieth century one of the world’s most distinctive literatures, giving us America’s greatest novelist, William Faulkner, and America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams, as well as other writers of genius, and many others of note.

The revisionist distortion of this remarkable literature is addressed cheerfully and with