even than Henry W. Grady and Marse Henry Watterson, for that matter, that "what the South needs now is -blood and irony." She set out in 1900 with The Voice of the People to write a long series of novels about the social history of Virginia centering around this concept. The Battle Ground, the second in the series, deals with the Civil War and is in many respects more astonishing than the work of a yankee such as Crane. When an aristocratic Viriginia lady permits a character to say "God damn the war!" she also damns the meaningless claptrap about "southern chivalry" once and for all. For an age still nurtured in sentiment it was no easy thing to accept a resourceful heroine such as Betty Ambler, who makes explicit many a modern notion about woman's role in society that Miss Ravenel left implicit. The severely realistic descriptions of non-combatants belongs to a world that could never have harbored two little Confederates, and the authentic glimpses of Negro folklore tell a story of the slave and ex-slave in Old Virginia that was hitherto unrecorded.

The new tendency to document fiction by comprehensive historical research is nowhere better illustrated than in the work of another Virginia lady novelist, Mary Johnston. Her devotion to Old Virginia was as fantastically romantic as John Fox's passion for the New Commonwealth; and if she had ever known the discipline of the scholarly historian, she might have earned a rank comparable to that of Clifford Dowdey's in the history of Virginia literature. Miss Johnston combined the vivid stories of the war told by her father (much as Hamlin Garland did in Trail-Makers of the Middle Border, 1926) with extensive reading to make The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912) fine analyses of the rise and fall of the Confederacy, but far too melodramatic and idealistic to have real meaning in the mainstream of American literature.

The three decades after the publication of The Battle Ground were vital ones for the development of the American novel, but themes other than the Civil War attracted the fancy of the novelists. A special exception is the first significant biographical novel of the war, Honoré Willsie Morrow's trilogy, The Great Captain (Forever Free, 1927; With Malice Toward None, 1928; and The Last Full Measure, 1930). Ranking with The Crisis as a picture of Lincoln, The Great Captain shows Kentucky's most illustrious son as a generous, warmly human personality, constantly harrassed by the petty official duties of the presidency and the antagonistic attitude of the radical Republicans. There is a spot of sentiment here and there, but any Lincolnian who can't indulge in sentiment

deserves to be condemned to reading doctoral dissertations on Federal administration procedure during the Civil War for the rest of his natural life. On the whole, The Great Captain is an accurate, scholarly portrait of Lincoln that will endure as one of our best biographical novels.

One flaw I suspect in The Great Captain is the picture of Mary Todd Lincoln as a devoted wife and lovable personality. Certain intimate family affiliations demand that I be loyal to the prevailing ideas about horses and women in the valleys of Stoner and the Elkhorn, but Mary Todd was the exception that proves the rule. While I doubt the calumny that my home town spawned a Secesh spy in Mrs. Lincoln, she ranks with Mrs. Carl Schurz as the most insufferable termagant of her age. Irving Stone's Love Is Eternal (1954; title from the inscription on the inside of the Lincoln-Todd wedding ring) is also a carefully documented biographical novel, but Stone, too, confuses the Lexington virago's decision to wed a plebeian country lawyer rather than to suffer well deserved spinsterhood with a fancy legend of genuine passion. Among other Civil War biographical novels Stone's Immortal Wife (1944) is a noteworthy study of an important Civil War personality and just as well documented as Love Is Eternal. Stone correctly portrays Jesse Benton as a strong and noble woman. She had to be to have tolerated a puffed-up bounder such as John C. Fremont.

A fourth fictionalized biography that deserves a permanent place in Civil War literature is Helen Todd's A Man Called Grant (1940). Miss Todd shucks the impedimenta of scholarship and gives free rein to her own concept of the man Grant. The book is plausible and correct in historical details (although the author's versions of many Civil War events are over-simplified), but the scholia of imagination on the solemn pages of formal history provide a new and wholesome perspective of a somewhat abused American leader.

There was a long drought of important fiction dealing with the Civil War after The Battle Ground. Aside from the work of Mary Johnston and Honoré Willsie Morrow, we have such books as John Fox's The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903), a part of every Kentucky boy's education, but little more; Randall Parrish's My Lady of the North (1904) and My Lady of the South (1919), hackneyed in theme but exciting in action; and Hamlin Garland's Trail-Makers of the Middle Border, thin as a novel but substantial as a portrait of U. S. Grant.

An event of major importance for American historical fiction was the publication in 1927 of James Boyd's Marching On. At long last it was safe to reveal that the conflict of 1860-65 had been a rich man's war, a poor man's fight. Boyd tells the story of James Fraser, a Johnny Reb buck private from a retarded rural area of North Carolina who faces battle with the same trepidation that Henry Fleming experienced. Boyd also draws an effective contrast between the poor white and the planter, but one suspects that he made some concessions to popular taste when he has James return after two years in a Unionist P. O. W. camp to wed Colonel Prevost's daughter. Still, there is the final tragedy, a forthright acknowledgement by Boyd that there was little light and absolutely no sweetness in the defeated South.

The last major Civil War novel before the thirties is Evelyn Scott's The Wave (1929), a curiously constructed book that shows the horror of war as a wave that engulfs ordinary humanity and blots out the revelance of individual destinies. A series of cinematic glimpses of civilian and military life, high and low, reveals war in its true colors. In the decade to come MacKinlay Kantor, Caroline Gordon, Clifford Dowdey, William Faulkner, and others were to take these individuals lost in the wave and develop them as fictional personalities of the highest order.

A few able writers still cultivated the romantic tradition at the beginning of the thirties, but the Depression brought home to all that the fancied luxury of the old-fashioned Southern plantation was gone forever. DuBose Heyward's title character in Peter Ashley (1932) is a Union sympathizer despite his aristocratic Charleston background but he surrenders to social pressure. Stark Young's So Red the Rose (1934) is an equally loving picture of plantation society, its decline and fall with the coming of war. We cannot help but shed a stoical tear with Young, but the historian will be inclined to think that Young might have done better to stick by his real skill as a professional translator from the Slavic languages.

Those who felt defeated by the Depression could take a Heyward or a Young as escapists, but the temper of the age would not accept this lightweight sort of thing in place of more serious fare. Thoroughly in conformity with prevailing attitudes was T. S. Stribling's The Forge (1931), one of the best of all social commentaries on the war with its story of the fortunes of the unaristocratic Vaidens in the red clay hills of Alabama. There is an

account of the Battle of Shiloh, but the fate of Ol' Pap Jimmy Vaiden, Hardshell Baptist and ex-blacksmith, is much more fascinating. Ol' Pap was far less interested in preserving the "chivalry" of a South that never was than in populating the country with mulatto children. Stribling expounds this theme further in the sequel, The Store, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 1932.

Allen Tate dealt with a more genteel society in The Fathers (1938), but one that was just as surely doomed as Ol' Pap Vaiden's pre-war enterprises. Tate shows the disintegration of a great Virginia estate in the late fifties and early sixties. A strong man who owes no debt or respect to the traditions of the pre-war South is a sort of a pre-figuration of the turmoil of the post-war South. The notion of the decay of a civilization is everywhere present, but the somewhat remote characters leave us in doubt about the final results. Much more effective are the two novels of Mrs. Tate (Caroline Gordon) dealing with the Confederate Kentucky of the Pennyrile and the Purchase, Penhally (1931) and None Shall Look Back (1937). The moribund feudalism which the Llewellyns and the Allards struggle to keep alive brings only violence and destruction. It is morally and psychologically cancerous, and the South has to make a final and definitive break with an untenable social order if it is to survive. None Shall Look Back is a remarkable fictionalized story of Bedford Forrest, the bogey man of the Fort Pillow story and the future Klan leader. Caroline Gordon swaps magnolias for corn pone when she lets young Rives Allard fall in battle as Old Forrest rides on like the fifth horseman.

Another commentary on the rites of sepulcher of the old South was the late Hervey Allen's Action at Aquila (1938), completely in the grand manner of this writer so popular in the thirties, but nevertheless faithful to reality in its conclusions. There are glowing pictures of the old life in the Shenandoah Valley and of its physical destruction by Colonel Franklin of Sheridan's staff. Brutal and useless as it all seems, Franklin sees a purpose in it, for he realized that "if Lee and his gallant rebels succeeded, there would be wars, endless Gettysburgs, raids, burnings, implacable anger and growing hatred, reprisals for generations to come." About the same time Clifford Dowdey published his fictional study of Richmond at war, Bugles Blow No More (1937). It is a remarkable piece not only for the psychological perception of individual minds at work but also for the picture of social change in the time of stress. When commoner marries patrician and the old barriers break down, we understand how a provincial Southern

city could endure the same changes that Paris or St. Petersburg suffered behind the barricades. Dowdey's apparent dislike for Jefferson Davis introduces an element of prejudice into an otherwise distinguished novel.

If we believe Dowdey, Allen, Tate, Gordon, Young, and some of the other writers in the thirties, the war was the ruination of the South. Nothing could be further from the truth. By 1870 the South, freed from the incubus of slave labor, produced the biggest and richest cotton crop of all time. Mr. W. B. Hesseltine proved in his Confederate Leaders of the New South (1950) that the same classes held power in the post-war South that had controlled the region earlier. Only seventy-one of 656 prominent Confederates failed to regain the power and prestige they enjoyed before the Reconstruction. The smartest ex-Confederates were perhaps James Longstreet and Raider Mosby, who knew that the Republicans could pass out the best plums. The South began to produce its own bumper crop of rubber barons in the magnates of the new industries and transportation systems. Atlanta, Birmingham, and Nashville were well on their way to being more midwestern (in the caricatured sense) than Toledo, Youngstown, or Akron.

In fiction the best known Confederate who fights back and wins is Scarlett O'Hara. Despite the wealth of Tara, Scarlett was always the Irish-American country girl whose sense of self-reliance would pull her through trials that would have destroyed a Melany or an Ashley. Scarlett sees no use in suffering martyrdom and refusing to fight back simply because Billy Sherman burned a few flimsy fire traps en route to the sea. Even more than a compromiser such as Henry W. Grady, Scarlett could envision real possibilities for a South that could defy tradition. Gone with the Wind (1936) owes its fame mainly to the fact that it is an entertaining story, but it also offers an interpretation of history for which the South was not fully prepared until three-quarters of a century after the forces of loyalty had unsheathed their terrible swift sword.

The tremendous individual potentials and social forces freed by the Civil War have had a powerful appeal for many writers who have broader aims than simply to tell a diverting story from the past. Often as not, they treat their theme irreverently from the standpoint of the idolater of tradition, but it is history none the less. Such a work is the sequence of seven short stories in William Faulkner's The Unvanquished (1938). It is, to be sure, loaded with local color and characters from the deep South; but the more