SOURCE: "In Search of a Common Identity: The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies," in The Southern Review, Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 47-64.

In the following essay, Andrews subjects four Mississippi autobiographies—including Lanterns on the Levee—to a comparative study which takes into account a number of factors, most notably racial issues.

"Your delta," he had said," "was not mine."

—Willie Morris

An article of faith among the first generation of southern literary modernists, writes Lewis Simpson, is "the truth that man's essential nature lies in his possession of the moral community of memory and history." Much has been written, of course, about what an obsession with the past has done to mold southern novelists into a recognizable and distinctive group. But if, as Hugh Holman has stated, "the southerner is not really interested in an abstract past; he is interested in his past," and...