The real cause of this outburst has not often been touched upon. The sudden vogue of Southern themes and Southern writers came not, as some have explained, from the fact that a distinctive Southern literature had arisen, or that a peculiar school had sprung up in one section of the country, just as, for instance, we may speak of the New England school earlier in the century. Nor is it explained by the theory that the close of the war brought a new feeling of individuality to the South, a consciousness of its own self which was to find expression in a group of writers, as England after the wars with Spain found expression in the Elizabethans. It was not a merely local manifestation. The term "Southern Literature," as now found in the titles of an increasing number of books and studies, is misleading. If the South, or any other section, is to produce a distinct literature of its own, that section must possess not alone themes and writers, but publishers as well, and widely circulated magazines of the type of the _Atlantic_ and the _Century_ and _Harper's_. It must have also critics and adequate critical standards, and, most important of all, it must have a clientele, readers enough to dispose of its own literary product. The South has had practically none of these save the literary themes and the writers. The turn of the tide from Western material and Western workers to material and workers from the South was a national phenomenon. It was in reality more a thing of the North than it was of the South. Without Northern publishers and magazines and criticism and readers there would have been no Southern literature. To illustrate with a concrete example: Richard Malcolm Johnston published at Augusta, Georgia, in 1864, _Georgia Sketches by an Old Man_. In 1871 he added more tales to the collection, published them in the _Southern Magazine_ of Baltimore, issued them in book form in the same city, with the title _Dukesborough Tales_, and a little later put forth a second and enlarged edition. Yet Edward Eggleston could say when Johnston as late as 1879 published his first story in a Northern magazine, "Mr. Neelus Peeler's Conditions," in _Scribner's Monthly_, that the reading public everywhere hailed his advent as that of a new and promising young man who had sent in his first story. It was not until the Harpers in 1883 issued a Northern edition of the much-published _Dukesborough Tales_ that Johnston ceased to be a producer of merely Southern literature.