“More than twenty-five years on, the distinction Willie Morris once drew between the formative influences shaping New York intellectuals and southern intellectuals still strikes a resonant chord.”

More than twenty-five years on, the distinction Willie Morris once drew between the formative influences shaping New York intellectuals and southern intellectuals still strikes a resonant chord. As Morris wrote in North toward Home (1967): With the Eastern Jewish intellectuals … the struggle as they grew up in the 1930s was for one set of ideas over others, for a fierce acceptance or rejection of one man’s theories or another man’s poetry. Morris went on to compare the astringent intellectuality of Manhattan with the quite different ambience familiar to the aspiring southern intellectual.