SOURCE: "Eskimos and Aristocrats," in The New Yorker, Vol. XVII, No. 5, March 15, 1941, pp. 71-3.

In the following excerpt, Fadiman takes a skeptical look at the romanticization of the agricultural South in Lanterns on the Levee.

From Castiglione's "The Courtier" to William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee, books by and about gentlemen have always made me a trifle uneasy. Garden-variety citizens like myself were taught somewhere or other, it seems to me, that the true gentleman is practically unaware of his status, does not need to insist on it, and never stoops—for that is an intellectual, not a gentlemanly, gesture—to analyze it. Mr. Percy, descendant of a long line of Southern gentlemen and, of course, gentlewomen, takes the situation with humor and grace—which cannot be said of that ineffable smug bore Castiglione—but even he cannot prevent the homiletic note from creeping in.

This said...