GOING SOUTH

Significant in modern American literature is the reappearance of the South to dispute with the uncouth West and the effete East the attentions of aspiring writers. Two recent works in different fields of literature which have won prizes in competition with hundreds of others, have both dealt, by singular coincidence, with the provincial picture-esqueness of Southern life. In "Hell-Bent Fer Heaven", the Pulitzer prize play for last year, Hatcher Hughes presented a light comedy in a remarkable setting among Southern mountaineers. In the November issue of "The Forum" is published that magazine's prize short story for 1924, which also has a Southern theme. "The Secret at the Cross-roads", as Jefferson Moseley has called his play, deals with the race question, not as a theorist searching for causes, but as a writer of clear vision dealing with facts.

The appearance of these two works is of epochal importance in American literature. For the litterateur the charm of the South has been confined very largely to the Old South of pre-Civil War days. The days of great plantations, the old aristocracy with its cult of chivalry and hospitality, the caste system of master and slave, have furnished fascinating and rich material for American authors. Uncle Remus of Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Tom of Harriet Beecher Stowe are among the immortal characters inspired by this period. Thomas Dixon, of contemporary fame, has drawn his material from the same source. But the Civil War destroyed the Old South of fable and romance and imposed a new order, both social and economic, upon the old. The South came to lose its provincial quaintness. And as North and South became welded closer together in feeling, interests, and customs, American literature turned toward the newer West for inspiration and novelty.

But beneath its surface of modern industrial veneer still lingers in the South a survival of that earlier individuality. The characters have changed, but South is still South, as the two prize works have revealed. Just as Gray's introduction of nature into English poetry was the prelude to countless rhapsodies on nature by succeeding poets, just as Montesquieu's "Letters Persanes" prefaced many a book both in France and elsewhere in letter form, so it is probable that "Hell-Bent Fer Heaven" and "The Secret at the Crossroads" will open to American literature a new field a field rich in possibilities, and one as yet only touched.