Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1941 by Sarah E. Gardner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1941 by Sarah E. Gardner Jolene Hubbs Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1941. By Sarah E. Gardner. Cambridge Studies on the American South. ( New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 316. $49.99, ISBN 978-1-107-14794-2.) Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920–1941 offers a fascinating take on American literary culture during the interwar years by turning attention to critics and their book reviews instead of authors and their novels. Across eight engagingly written and meticulously researched chapters, Sarah E. Gardner explores how the [End Page 501] commercial book industry worked and how reviewers responded to novels grappling with race, class, and southern history. With its fresh approach to the Southern Renaissance and sustained engagement with the South's significance in the national imagination between the world wars, Reviewing the South will be an engrossing read for southern studies specialists and scholars interested in U.S. literary history. Gardner reveals the "inner workings of the book industry" in the first two chapters (p. 9). Using startling statistics about purchasing patterns—for example, of all book purchases in the United States in 1938, 30 percent were in New York whereas just 7.12 percent occurred in the eleven states of the former Confederacy—she establishes how interwar southern literature became an export good, feeding readers' appetites for "exotic and foreign locales" (p. 17). The next two chapters show that the period's famous renaissances—the Southern Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance—were "initially artifices of the book industry and as such often reinforced one another in surprising ways" (p. 80). Chapters 5 and 6 look at how critics reacted to authors such as William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell and to "social protest novels" that portrayed poverty in the South (p. 186). Chapters 7 and 8 survey reviews about works that engaged with southern history. The epilogue uses Lillian Smith's best-selling debut novel Strange Fruit (1944) to make a compelling case for how World War II changed the literary landscape. Digging into this less familiar side of the literary realm, Gardner unearths important information about the reception history of southern texts. By spotlighting writers' relationships with reviewers, Gardner illuminates how authors worked to shape critical responses to their publications. When it came time for Stark Young to review Ellen Glasgow's Vein of Iron (1935), he drew liberally from Glasgow's own explanation of her novel's themes, which she had enumerated in a letter to Young after learning that he was reviewing her book for the New Republic. Reviewing the South also shows that for a lot of new books timing is everything. Despite largely favorable reviews, James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) sold fewer than six hundred copies during its first year in print because "southern poverty was no longer in vogue" (p. 214). By 1941, readers were looking for works that could help them understand America's role in the growing crises in Asia and Europe. Gardner brings to life interwar newspapers' book columns and supplements by making good use of choice tidbits from piquant reviews. To give her readers a taste of Malcolm Cowley's style, for instance, Gardner offers colorful selections from Cowley's review of Gone with the Wind (1936), which, among other zingers, credits the 1,037-page novel with including "'every last bale of cotton and bushel of moonlight'" to paint a picture of "'Southern female devotion working its lilywhite fingers uncomplainingly to the lilywhite bone'" (p. 274). Gardner herself is no slouch of a writer, and her clear prose and strong organization make this a pleasurable and educational read. [End Page 502] Jolene Hubbs University of Alabama Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association