In this insight-studded work that established him as the premier interpreter of southern literary culture, Fred Hobson explores the southern urge toward self-examination, the seeming compulsion of southern writers to discuss their region -- some defending it, others damning it. He focuses on fourteen practitioners of the southern genre of regional confession who wrote between 1850 and 1970, showing how they -- in many cases linking their own destinies with the fate of the South -- produced deeply felt, impassioned books that sought to explain the region to outsiders as well as to fellow southerners, and perhaps most of all to themselves.