The American South [antikvár]

Early in 1977 I was invited by the Voice of America Forum Branch of the United States Information Agency (now the United States International Communication Agency) to organize and coordinate a series of presentations on the topic of the American South today. The emphasis would be cultural and literary, since it was through the region's literature that the South was best known to overseas audiences. It seemed a good time for such a project; a Southerner had just been inaugurated President of the United States, the first to be elected since the 1840s, and the election was being widely viewed as a sign that the long separation of the South, culturally and politically, from the remainder of the American unión had come to an end. Very well. As viewed through its literature and attendant cultural and social reflectors, what was the condition of the South today? Was it disappearing? Was it changing? In what ways had its relations with the nation and the world changed? Or not changed? My part of the project was to enlist the services of a number of persons, most of them writers, who were interested in the South and knew something about it. The Voice of America would interview each of them and broadcast the interview to overseas audiences. Each participant would then write out a more formai presentation of the subject, and the se would be collected and published in an overseas edition by the USICA. There would alsó be an American edition, but not under the auspices of the USICA. As coordinator I was to make all these arrangements, and alsó to contribute an opening presentation, a concluding essay, and at least one additional presentation. The papers that follow are designed for the informed nonspecialist (though obviously the participants have differed in their estimate of just how informed that non-speciálist was to be). There is no attempt to present a complete, thoroughgoing analysis of the South today. What we sought to do was to observe the South and its culture from various perspectives and then to take a look at what its literature has been and now is. Admittedly the presenta-