In the early 1920s a collection of young Southerners at Vanderbilt University formed the literary group known as the Fugitives. Over the next few decades they and their followers exerted an enormous influence on the study of literature. Indeed, the "Southern Critics" included some of the most important American writers and critics of the twentieth century among them Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Cleanth Brooks.<BR><BR>In The Southern Critics: An Anthology, editor Glenn C. Arbery gathers the most penetrating essays by these and other writers, bringing their significant contributions back into focus with his enlightening commentary. The Southern Critics speak directly to our time, offering remarkably prescient warnings about the threat that "progress" poses to traditional life and culture. It is time to recover the wisdom of these brilliant writers.<BR><BR>"In these late, ever-darkening days of the industrial-technological revolution, Arbery has provided us with an essential guidebook to what Allen Tate called `a profound change...in the moral and religious outlook of Western man.'"---David Middleton, poetry editor, Modern Age<BR><BR>"The Southern tradition unexpectedly reemerged in the 1920s and `30s in a brilliant outpouring of fiction, poetry and literary criticism which challenged the American modernity of its time when the wood was still green. That critique speaks to us even more so today when the wood is dry."---Donald Livingston, professor of philosophy, Emory University