A few weeks ago I was in California getting cash out of a dive bar’s ATM. Nearby, a group of friends had a heated discussion about someone they had collectively decided was “cancelled”. From what I could gather, this person had espoused a racist comment or idea. “They’re from the South,” one said. With a sentence, it was as though they had entirely summed up the perpetrator. Case closed, their coffin nailed shut.

I grew up in Tennessee. Upon leaving home, new friends assumed my politics. One expressed genuine fear at the idea of going to college in the South. From an early age, I understood that to be from the South, and to be white from the South, was to be all of the region’s history in human form. Steeped in a past of slavery, post-Civil War poverty, and a national perception of ignorance and prejudice, the South was a place from which to run. To have an accent? The kiss of death.

The dawn of the twentieth century met the American South only thirty-five years out from its defeat in the Civil War. Plantation houses remained charred, empty vestiges of an aristocratic society entirely reliant upon the enslavement of humans. At this time, much of the literature emerging from the South reflected an attempt to maintain a myth, one that told of a benevolent plantation society in which slaveholders and slaves mutually benefitted from the institution. An entire genre arose known as ‘Moonlight and Magnolias’, the works of which embodied this fallacy and perpetuated a fascination with plantation culture in the popular mind. Southern literature bemoaned the ‘Lost Cause’ and operated under the guise that white people were the unjust victims of Reconstruction. Authors depicted a non-violent, gentile, and nostalgic version of the antebellum South that simply never existed.. 

The inability for Southern writers to honestly examine their culture created a vacuum. In 1917, Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken published a critical essay on the South titled ‘The Sahara of the Bozart’. He attacked what he deemed a cultural wasteland, proclaiming, ‘...when you come to critics, musical composers, painters, sculptors, architects and the like…in all these fields the South is an awe inspiring blank’. These words circulated across the country and landed among a group of students, professors, and community members in and around Vanderbilt University. Already deeply passionate about writing, Mencken’s scathing commentary catalyzed the group of sixteen to action. The product was a new Southern literature. 

From 1922 to 1925, The Fugitive magazine published bi-monthly collections of poems and essays. More than a magazine, it became a forum where individuals from varied stages of life united to improve their craft through regular meetings and workshops. Rather than produce plantation-myth literature, the Fugitives aimed to build a body of work that rivaled contemporary, urban writers. From the magazine’s first edition, the group effectively divorced itself from the Moonlight and Magnolias trend through their mission statement which reads: “The Fugitive flees from nothing faster than the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South.” 

Situating poems in the South, therefore, was only included if relevant to a work. In many instances the purpose of such was to capture the region’s decay. In his poem, “Conrad in Twilight”, Fugitive leader John Crowe Ransom compared the rural landscape in autumn to the dreary color of discarded, wet cornstalks. In another of Ransom’s poems, “Old Mansion”, the narrator walks through an abandoned plantation house–likely an experience many of the Fugitives shared having been raised in the post-bellum South. In Stanley Johnson’s “A Sonnet of the Yellow Leaf”,  autumn along the Cumberland River is a “wreckage” and a “burial” of summer’s “glory”. Rather than perpetuate the outmoded values of elite, white Southerners, the Fugitives did something new in simply writing of the place as it was: rural and forgotten. 

Many argue that The Fugitive gave rise to a Southern literary Renaissance. In turning away from the plantation myth, the Fugitives opened the door to a flood of twentieth-century Southern writers who looked critically at their home for what it was, not what it had been or could be. This movement is remembered by names such as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren (who found his voice as a Fugitive), and others. 

Today, the South seems to be undergoing a second Renaissance, one that extends far beyond the reaches of literature. The region is currently the fastest-growing in the country, which is largely a result of the pandemic and its economic after-effects. With more people working remote jobs, the South’s average lower costs of living and lower income tax rates are especially appealing. According to the Missouri Economic and Information Research Center, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Tennessee comprise five of the ten most affordable states in the U.S. Alternatively, the most expensive are Hawaii, Massachusetts, California, and New York. Furthermore, Tennessee, Florida, and Texas are three of nine states with no state income tax, while the rest of the South’s tax rates hover between 3% and 6%. Compare this with California’s 13.3%, Hawaii’s 11%, and New York’s 10.9%. People are fleeing cosmopolitan urbanity for dusty backroads and financial reprieve.

The South’s re-birth is reflected in the arts as well. Arts and culture magazines abound as publications celebrate those who were silenced during the Fugitive’s era: Black Americans, women, immigrants. The Bitter Southerner explores the political and cultural complexities of the contemporary South. Burnaway informs readers about the region’s art scene. Scalawag holds no hesitations in its evaluation of the political landscape, while Oxford American seeks to understand what it means to be Southern. 

Thinking back to the group in the California dive bar, they had it wrong. To be “racist” is no longer a uniquely Southern malady. While the United States as a whole marches down an ever darker tunnel of white nationalism and xenophobia, Southern writers remain especially unafraid to confront the region’s and nation’s faults, a characteristic perhaps attributable to the headstrong Fugitives a century ago. As it expands in population and perspective, the American South celebrates a twisted yet colorful tapestry that tells an important lesson: to embrace the imperfect is to be freed. 

 Footnote: All that said, the Fugitives should not be remembered as early promoters of a just and equal South. Vanderbilt University, which so lauded their accomplishments throughout the twentieth century, no longer claims them as their own. This is largely due to the fact that, not long after the Fugitive magazine’s 1925 expiration, four key members started a group known as the Southern Agrarians. In 1930, this group published a series of essays titled I’ll Take My Stand. While the Fugitives called for a move away from the plantation myth, each essay in this text ironically calls for a return to an agrarian economic mode, one that in the South and the United States at large, is inseparable from the institution of slavery. 

Bryant, J.A. Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

 “Cost of Living Data Series.” Missouri Economic Research and Information Center. Accessed October 30, 2025. https://meric.mo.gov/data/cost-living-data-series#:~:text=Table_title:%202025%20Quarter%203%20Cost%20of%20Living,%7C%20State:%20Texas%20%7C%20Index:%2090.8%20%7C. 

Hubbs, Jolene. Class Whiteness, and Southern Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.-47.

Mellette, Justin. “Moonlight and Magnolias No More: The New Plantation Tradition and Its Respondents.” In A History of the Literature of the U.S. South. Edited by Hariloas Stecopoulos, 215-226. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 

Mencken, H.L. ‘The Sahara of the Bozart.’ [originally published 1917] in H.L. Mencken. The American Scene: A Reader. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective. edited by William Pratt. Nashville: J.S. Sanders & Company, 1996.

Bibliography