Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 235. Illustrations. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $24.95.)In Hearts of Darkness, Bertram Wyatt-Brown traces the thread of depression through the lives and art of southern writers from Poe Glasgow. The figures he explores are familiar enough: Poe, Tucker, Hammond, Ruffin, Simms, Lamar, Lincoln, O'Hara, Chivers, Lanier, Timrod, Porter, Harris, Twain, Woolson, Chopin, Gather, and Glasgow. What is unique is that Wyatt-Brown brings them all together in a discussion of southern art and southern sadness. Certainly the private lives of these authors comprise a tale of staggering collective grief. Of the eighteen, nine lost parents early, seven lost children early, seven lost spouses early, eight lost siblings early, and nine lost their own lives early-one jumped out a window, one shot himself, one was murdered, two died of tuberculosis, and four drank themselves death. Then too there were tragedies that defy easy categorization. Twain witnessed his father's autopsy, Porter probably was raped in prison, and Simms lived bury eight of his children. Blood flows like a river in this book, twisting and turning through the hope-blasted South.What interests Wyatt-Brown, however, is what these writers did with all these awful emotions. Great literature, he contends, often proceeds from profound gloom. Art is a rage against the dying of the light, and night falls fast in the South, where pellagra and malaria, ignorance and backwardness, national defeat and a host of gray ghosts lay daily siege the artistic mind. In exorcising these haunts, southern authors transformed their personal pain and regional problems into a literary tradition that laid the underpinnings for modernism and the Southern Renaissance.Wyatt-Brown is careful, however, not give these authors too much credit, particularly the antebellum ones. Taking issue with Michael O'Brien and others who think the South produced a reasonably vibrant literature before the war, he presents a region preoccupied by honor and plagued by a failure to explore the interiority of personality, question old verities, the cruelty of social restraints, or the tyranny of custom (86). This establishes a foil for his culminating chapters in which turn-of-the-century southern women lead the way in casting off the South's repressive traditions.This makes for a tidy narrative arc, but make it work, Wyatt-Brown has pass quiet judgment on what is and is not successful art. This is an unenviable position for a historian. In the main, his criteria for success are sensible enough: art is successful the extent that it renders with complexity, sublimity, and fairness the turmoil and beauty of the human condition. …