The Fable of the Southern Writer

"With a breadth and depth unsurpassed by any other cultural historian of the South, Lewis Simpson examines the writing of southerners Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Arthur Crew Inman, William Styron, and Walker Percy. Simpson offers challenging essays of easy erudition blessedly free of academic jargon.... [They] do not propose to support an overall thesis, but simply explore the southern writer's unique relationship with his or her region, bereft of myth and tradition, in the grasp of science and history." -- Library Journal

ewis P. Simpson, former coeditor of the Southern Review,is Boyd Professor and William A. Read Professor of English, emeritus, at Louisiana State University. A founding member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and past president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, he is the author or editor of more than thirteen books, including Mind and the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost Causes, winner of the Avery O. Craven Award.