FICTION
Some of the best historical material on the changing South is in the form of fiction. A number of gifted writers have pictured limited fields with skill and truth. Mary Noailles Murfree (pseud., Charles Egbert Craddock) has written of the mountain people of Tennessee, while John Fox, Jr. has done the same for Kentucky and the Virginia and West Virginia mountains. George W. Cable and Grace King have depicted Louisiana in the early part of this period, while rural life in Georgia has been well described in the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, better known from his Uncle Remus books. In The Voice of the People (1900) Ellen Glasgow has produced, in the form of fiction, an important historical document on the rise of the common man. In The Southerner (1909) Nicholas Worth (understood to be the pseudonym of a distinguished editor and diplomat) has made a careful study of conditions in North Carolina between 1875 and 1895, while Thomas Dixon in The Leopard's Spots (1902) has crudely but powerfully drawn a picture of the campaign for negro disfranchisement in that State.
In his Old Judge Priest stories, Irvin S. Cobb has described the rural towns of Kentucky; and Corra Harris from personal experience has given striking pictures of the rural South principally in relation to religion. The short stories of Harris Dickson portray the negro of the Mississippi towns. The stories of Thomas Nelson Page and of Ruth McEnery Stuart should also be mentioned. Owen Wister has drawn a striking picture of Charleston in Lady Baltimore (1906), while Henry Sydnor Harrison in Queed (1911) and his later stories has done something similar for Richmond.