Bypaths in Dixie: Folk Tales of the South

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Bypaths in Dixie, by Sarah Johnson Cocke

“DES LIKE SHE RUB’IN ON YORN.”
BYPATHS IN DIXIE
FOLK TALES OF THE SOUTH
BY SARAH JOHNSON COCKE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HARRY STILLWELL EDWARDS
NEW YORK E·P·DUTTON & COMPANY 31 West Twenty-Third Street
Copyright, 1911 By E. P. Dutton & Company Reprinted, May, 1912
TO MY HUSBAND

When Thomas Nelson Page began his stories of the old South in the early “Eighties,” the reading people of America suddenly aroused to the realization that a vein of virgin gold had been uncovered. There was a rush to the new field and almost every Southerner who had a story to tell told it, many of them with astonishing dramatic force and power. As by magic a new department was added to American literature and a score of new writers won their way to fame. From a notably backward section, in point of expression, the South stepped easily, with the short story, into the front rank and has held her place ever since. The field once entered was explored faithfully, the eager minds of her sons and daughters running through the Ante-Bellum, Revolutionary and Colonial eras, and when Joel Chandler Harris developed the “Brer Rabbit” stories, “The Little Boy” and “Uncle Remus,” it seemed as though future work must lie in refining for the ore was all in sight.