William Faulkner: the discovery of a man's vocation -- Scarlett O'Hara and the two Quentin Compsons -- Art and artistry in Morgana, Mississippi -- Thomas Wolfe and the place he came from -- In search of the country of art: Thomas Wolfe's Of time and the river -- Allen Tate, 1899-1979 -- Flannery O'Connor's company of Southerners or, "The artificial nigger" read as fiction rather than theology -- Carson McCullers: the aesthetic of pain -- Trouble on the land: Southern literature and the Great Depression -- Shelby Foote's Civil War -- The boll weevil, the iron horse, and the end of the line: thoughts on the South