Editor's note.

With this special issue, Writing in the South, we offer the seventeenth number in an ongoing series dating back to volume 4, number 2, our spring 1968 issue. The choice to put together this new instance of a series nearly forty years on didn't grow out of a felt obligation to a publishing calendar or literary creed; rather, sitting in my office one morning about a year ago I discovered that I was accepting to publish a handful of notable stories and poems that might be considered "southern," and something more. I turned then from my desk to the shelves of back issues across the room and realized it had been some time since a new number in this series had appeared. Thus I began, in my own journeyman way, to edit this latest entry in what may well be the longest series of special issues any literary quarterly has published.

But before making the official decision to move forward with this plan, I looked back into the pages of Lewis Simpson's inaugural number of the series to find, if I could, what the contributors therein had meant by "southern,"' and to begin with, what the editor was after in bringing out a special number addressing the topic. Certainly the taproot of the Southern Review is and was and always will be the fact of its having been founded by Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Charles Pipkin in the midst of the Southern Renaissance, a time when one might actually find in the mail a story from Eudora Welty or Peter Taylor and regard the name on the return address to be as singular and seminal to American literature as Jane Smith or John Doe.

Among other things, I found in that spring 1968 issue an illuminating essay by novelist and critic Walter Sullivan. "In Time of the Breaking of Nations: The Decline of Southern Fiction" is a remarkably frank and astute appraisal of the current state of affairs in contemporary southern writing, albeit forty years ago. I recall experiencing a surprising recognition on reading Mr. Sullivan's judicious assessment of southern writing: the strange sense that, writing decades ago, he was yet foreshadowing things to come, his a kind of prophetic statement of both what southern writing was at that moment and what it needed to be before it would matter again. Most remarkable about the piece is that it speaks to our day, to this present moment in literary history, as pointedly as it did in 1968.

The oracular dimension is so strong in that essay by Mr. Sullivan that I quoted its final paragraphs in our Web site's call for manuscripts for the current special issue. Here I do so again:

 
      Some of the attributes of the traditional South remain and many 
   of them are rich in drama. They can be used by the novelist: but 
   they will have to be used. All the crazy characters in the South; 
   all the sense of the past; all the manners good and bad; all the 
   woods and fields and streams are only empty vessels now and they 
   will have to be filled and reformed according to each individual 
   writer's own metaphysic. And the Southern writer had better stop 
   allowing himself to be misled. For the past twenty years 
   [1948-1968], young authors coming to maturity have congratulated 
   themselves on being born in Tennessee or Alabama or Mississippi 
   or Georgia, lands that they can both hate and love, countries of 
   rich tradition and tall tales. But the self-praise was premature: 
   living under the shadow of the giants of the renaissance and 
   trying to follow in their footsteps, the young writers have 
   largely failed. The significant exception is Flannery O'Connor, 
   whose voice was the only distinctly new and original one yet to 
   arise in the post-renaissance South. Recently, a Midwestern 
   writer, and a very good one, visited Nashville, which was his 
   first trip to the South since his ...