There was no real literary public
in the South for a native writer like Simms. He was as dependent
upon New York and the Northern market as a Virginian
tobacco-planter of 1740 had been upon London. But within a dozen
years after the close of the War and culminating in the
eighteen-nineties, there came a rich and varied harvest of
Southern writing, notably in the field of fiction. The public for
these stories, it is true, was still largely in the North and
West, and it was the magazines and publishing-houses of New York
and Boston that gave the Southern authors their chief stimulus
and support. It was one of the happy proofs of the solidarity of
the new nation.
The romance of the Spanish and French civilization of New
Orleans, as revealed in Mr. Cable's fascinating "Old Creole
Days," was recognized, not as something merely provincial in its
significance, but as contributing to the infinitely variegated
pattern of our national life. Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler
Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page portrayed in verse and prose the
humorous, pathetic, unique traits of the Southern negro, a type
hitherto chiefly sketched in caricature or by strangers.
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