SOURCE: Cotterill, R. S. “Literature.” In The Old South: The Geographic, Economic, Social, Political, and Cultural Expansion, Institutions, and Nationalism of the Ante-bellum South, pp. 293-314. Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1939.

In the following essay, Cotterill disparagingly assesses the writing of the Old South, from newspaper journalism to fiction.

It is more than probable that in the field of literature the people of the Old South deserved to be ranked as consumers rather than producers. It was not that they neglected to cultivate the literary field; they did, with diligence and fine determination. But the net result of the labor which they took under the sun was a literary output in whose huge quantity only an occasional flash of quality made itself visible. Nor did Southern literature differ materially from that of the North: throughout the United States in the ante-bellum period writing was much less...