University of Georgia Press, 1995

In writing this review, I promised myself I would not start by alluding to a collection of essays on the South written almost seventy years ago by a dozen intellectuals associated with Vanderbilt University. Just because the new collection, The South as an American Problem, is the work of a dozen writers associated (more or less) with Vanderbilt University was no reason to take such a stand—or so I thought. But, alas, there is no getting around it: Although The South as an American Problem is not organized as tightly as the famous Fugitive/Agrarian manifesto of 1930, it covers enough of the same ground to invite comparison, as Larry J. Griffin and Don H. Doyle, the editors of the newer collection, readily acknowledge.