Mr. Sinclair Lewis may be said to have achieved the characterization par excellence of the standardized America in _Main Street_ and _Babbit_. Of the studies of sectional and provincial types there have been many poor and a few fine ones in prose. In poetry, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson have been most distinguished in dealing with New England. In the drama Eugene O'Neil has frequently found his finest _métier_ in the provincial. Peculiarly tempting, to those artists who have desired to present the more extreme provincial types of character, has been the wide field of the South, "Uncle Sam's Other Country", where the feudal tradition of the plantation, the isolated Mountain Whites, or the realm of the negro have successively, but not always successfully, engaged various pens. A host of names in this connection might be quoted both of authors and of titles, many of which would be familiar. In the last few years, the negro, owing largely to the fact that his emigration in large numbers northward has suddenly called him to the attention of our metropolitan writers--who now find that he is a reality in their midst instead of a romantic myth or a minstrel character--the negro thus, has become the preoccupation of innumerable writers in prose and poetry, but more especially in music. It is no exaggeration to say, and not a derogation for the purpose of argument to admit, that in the final analysis most of those who have essayed the task of depicting provincial conditions in the South, involving the essentially differing peculiarities of minor Southern localities where the plantation, industrialism, the negro, and the Mountain White are all factors--it is we repeat, no derogation to say that for the most part those who have attempted to handle these themes in a major literary way have fallen short of the mark. This situation has largely arisen from the fact that only those who were natives of the South could understand the genuine realities of the conditions they undertook to depict. Yet there was another complication, those who were born in the South by the traditions of their birthright were often inhibited from assuming an attitude toward their own section, one that is necessary to project a work of art. This attitude may be described as that of the "intimately-detached". Such was very largely the condition of present day American letters in regard to matters "South" when in 1925 Mr. Du Bose Heyward of Charleston, S.C., contributed his comment on the negro. The scene of the story is laid in one of the oldest plantation communities on the continent slowly melting from its former outlines in the crucible of "progress".