The New Orleans writer Grace King was an intensely loyal daughter of the South. Fostered by bitter memories of the Civil War, her loyalty was kept burning by her family’s struggle to regain its wealth and maintain its social position during the long agony of Reconstruction. In Grace King: A Southern Destiny, Robert Bush tells of King’s life and her art, both of which she enthusiastically dedicated to the memory and welfare of her region, her city, and her family. When she began writing in 1886, it was out of a sense of anger at what she saw as George Washington Cable’s disloyalty to the South, his deliberately false portrayal of New Orleans’ Creoles and blacks. King was herself a conservative in racial matters, and a number of her stories celebrate the loyalty that she has observed freed slaves showing their former masters. But Grace King was far from conservative in her determination to earn money as a writer and to master the ideas of her era—neither endeavor considered a particularly appropriate ambition for a patrician woman of her time. She was proud to be able to contribute to her family’s income, and she developed a sharp eye for the fluctuations in the literary marketplace. In the late 1880s King worked in the local-color genre that was then in vogue. When the demand for that school of regional writing declined in the 1890s, she turned to the shorter “balcony stories” in which the details of local background were minimized. Then later in the decade, she focused her talents on writing Louisiana history after she found that publishers wanted the kind of sound, colorful work she was capable of producing. Grace King’s major accomplishments in fiction are a small number of first-rate stories and a quiet, realistic novel about New Orleans during Reconstruction—The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard. Her best historical work is New Orleans, the Place and the People. However the significance and fascination of her life lies not just in the pages of the books she wrote but also in her role as a literary champion of the South, carrying her determined views from New Orleans to New York, New England, Canada, England, and France.

First published in 1988, this book contains entries on famous American Humorists. Humor has been present in American literature, from the beginning, and has developed characteristics that reflect the American character, both regional and national. Although American literature was, in the past, treated as inferior to British literature, there has always been a large popular audience for the genre, which this book shows. The figures with entries in this encyclopedia not only amuse in their writing, but also aim to enlighten- setting out to expose the foibles and foolishness of society and the individuals who compose it. It is the manner in which these authors try to accomplish this end that determines whether they appear in the volume. Indeed, the book will demonstrate that the best humor has at its base, a ready understanding of human nature.

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.