First published in 1930, the essays in this manifesto constitute one of the outstanding cultural documents in the history of the South. In it, twelve southerners-Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, Henry Blue Kline, Lyle H. Lanier, Stark Young, Allen Tate, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Herman Clarence Nixon, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, John Donald Wade, and Robert Penn Warren-defended individualism against the trend of baseless conformity in an increasingly mechanized and dehumanized society.

Underwood's carefully selected collection of six key Agrarians' essays, combined with a revealing new introduction, offers a radically revised view of the movement as it was redefined and revived during the New Deal.

One of the most important of the Southern magazines in the 1920s was The Fugitive, a magazine of verse and brief commentaries on literature in general. Among its contributors were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, and Merrill Moore. Publication began in April 1922 and ended in December 1925. Soon thereafter, the “Fugitive” writers and some others became profoundly concerned with the materialism of American life and its effect upon the South. The group became known as “Agrarians.” Their thinking and discussion culminated in a symposium, I'll Take My Stand, published in 1930. In his first two lectures Davidson describes the underlying nature and aims of the Fugitive and Agrarian movements. He brings to the discussion his intimate and thorough knowledge of Southern life and letters. The third lecture deals with the place of the writer in the modern university, posing the questions of whether the writer needs the university and whether the university needs or wants the writer.

In 1930, a group of southern intellectuals led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren published I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. A stark attack on industrial capitalism and a defiant celebration of southern culture, the book has raised the hackles of critics and provoked passionate defenses from southern loyalists ever since. As Paul Murphy shows, its effects on the evolution of American conservatism have been enduring as well. Tracing the Agrarian tradition from its origins in the 1920s through the present day, Murphy shows how what began as a radical conservative movement eventually became, alternately, a critique of twentieth-century American liberalism, a defense of the Western tradition and Christian humanism, and a form of southern traditionalism--which could include a defense of racial segregation. Although Agrarianism failed as a practical reform movement, its intellectual influence was wide-ranging, Murphy says. This influence expanded as Ransom, Tate, and Warren gained reputations as leaders of the New Criticism. More notably, such "neo-Agrarians" as Richard M. Weaver and M. E. Bradford transformed Agrarianism into a form of social and moral traditionalism that has had a significant impact on the emerging conservative movement since World War II.

An impassioned, thoughtful, and fearless essay on the effects of racism on the American identity by one of our country’s most humane literary voices. Acclaimed as “one of the most humane, honest, liberating works of our time” (The Village Voice), The Hidden Wound is a book-length essay about racism and the damage it has done to the identity of our country. Through Berry’s personal experience, he explains how remaining passive in the face of the struggle of racism further corrodes America’s great potential. In a quiet and observant manner, Berry opens up about how his attempt to discuss racism is rooted in the hope that someday the historical wound will begin to heal. Pulitzer prize-winning author Larry McMurtry calls this “a profound, passionate, crucial piece of writing . . . Few readers, and I think, no writers will be able to read it without a small pulse of triumph at the temples: the strange, almost communal sense of triumph one feels when someone has written truly well . . . The statement it makes is intricate and beautiful, sad but strong.” “Mr. Berry is a sophisticated, philosophical poet in the line descending from Emerson and Thoreau." ―The Baltimore Sun "[Berry’s poems] shine with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of life." ―The Christian Science Monitor "Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life." ―The Bloomsbury Review “[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” ―Publishers Weekly

The southern Agrarians were a group of twelve young men who joined, from 1929 to 1937, in a fascinating intellectual and political movement. Prominent among them were Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Donald Davidson. In the midst of the depression, these gifted writers tried, as did so many other intellectuals, to plot the best cultural and economic choices open to southerners and Americans as a whole. That they failed to gain most of their goals does not diminish the significance of their crusade, or the enduring values that they espoused. Interweaving group biography and intellectual history, Conkin traces how these young intellectuals came to write their classic manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, relates their political advocacy to the earlier Fugitive movement in poetry, and follows their careers after the Agrarian crusade fell apart. More than any other historian or critic, Conkin takes seriously the economic and political beliefs of these southern writers.

By the 1920s, the sectional reconciliation that had seemed achievable after Reconstruction was foundering, and the South was increasingly perceived and portrayed as impoverished, uneducated, and backward. In this interdisciplinary study, Angie Maxwell examines and connects three key twentieth-century moments in which the South was exposed to intense public criticism, identifying in white southerners' responses a pattern of defensiveness that shaped the region's political and cultural conservatism. Maxwell exposes the way the perception of regional inferiority confronted all types of southerners, focusing on the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and the birth of the anti-evolution movement; the publication of I'll Take My Stand and the turn to New Criticism by the Southern Agrarians; and Virginia's campaign of Massive Resistance and Interposition in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Tracing the effects of media scrutiny and the ridicule that characterized national discourse in each of these cases, Maxwell reveals the reactionary responses that linked modern southern whiteness with anti-elitism, states' rights, fundamentalism, and majoritarianism.