An examination of the literary marketplace's central role in creating the Southern Literary Renaissance.

Introduction: from Renaissance to reformation; 1. The world the reviewers made; 2. The cultural economy of reading in the interwar years; 3. The South meets Harlem; 4. Confronting Jim Crow; 5. Away down South in the land of problems; 6. A class of burden bearers; 7. The most audacious book ever written by Southerners; 8. Fiction fights the Civil War; Epilogue.

Sarah Gardner is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Southern Studies at Mercer University, Georgia where she teaches courses on the American South, nineteenth-century America, and print culture. She is the author of Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 (2012) and co-editor of Voices of the American South (2004).