The Old South, as it used to be, lives again in these wonderful stories and sketches drawn from widely different sources and depicting life from Virginia to Texas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This is a fascinating book for every reader, whether a Southern native or someone who hails from elsewhere. The selections are intended to illustrate the mind, customs, and life of the South in various localities and eras. The census taker and the soldier, the Tennessee mountaineer and the plantation slave, the Southern colonel and a host of other typical characters fill these pages, each portraying a peculiar section or time.
The stories were selected from a vast quantity of writing about the South and this volume contains some well-known pieces as well as a number that are lesser known but still definitively Southern in character and flavor.
Among the more famous authors represented here are Lafcadio Hearn, with "The Legend of L'île Dernière"; Edgar Allan Poe, with "The Balloon Hoax"; Joel Chandler Harris, with "The Fate of Mr. Jack Sparrow"; William Sidney Porter—better known as O. Henry—with "The Moment of Victory"; James Weldon Johnson, with "The Creation"; and Don Marquis with "A Mean Joke. There are fifteen other writers included here as well, all of whose stories convey the essence of the South.
As editor May Lamberton Becker says in her introduction, "All this is part, not only of the South, but of our America." And this is a book not only for Southerners but also for all Americans and for all who love American literature.
MAY LAMBERTON BECKER, a writer and editor of wide renown, was for many years the "Reader's Guide" columnist for the New York Evening Post and later for the New York Herald Tribune. She was, at various times, editor of several leading magazines, including St. Nicholas, and was also author and editor of numerous books and anthologies for both children and adults, among them The Home Book of Christmas and Golden Tales of New England. May Lamberton Becker died in 1958.
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