They Took Their Stand: The Emergence of the Southern Agrarians

Abstract

It was no ordinary book, that collection of impassioned essays published on November 12, 1930. In the pitch and stress of the Great Depression,I'll Take My Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition, created by twelve Southerners, proved to be a prophetic confrontation, no mere “ineffectual lamentation of some impractical neo-Confederates over the passing of the golden age of slavery.” It represented, as Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Southern literary historian and critic, put it, “the first stages of a widespread revolt against computerized, depersonalized, machine-oriented society and its ruthless exploitation of the environment and its human inhabitants.”