C. Vann Woodward, 1908-1999

Looking back at his dissatisfaction with the traditional "consensus" school which emphasized the continuity of the old and the New South, Comer Vann Woodward wrote that as a southern historian he took his lead from the South's writers. "If southern novelists, poets, and playwrights," he wrote, "could, as Robert Penn Warren admonished us, 'accept the past and its burden' without evasiveness or defensiveness or special pleading, why should southern historians not profit from their example?" This was the approach to southern history that eventuated in Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel and in Origins of the New South, and that reshaped the basic thrust of southern historiography.

Vann Woodward was briefly my teacher and for fifty years my friend. He was an early supporter of the Southern Literary Journal; he did much to arrange for us to tape the session on "History and the Novel" at the Southern Historical Association meeting in New Orleans in 1968. With Vann as moderator and Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren, and William Styron as participants, the session took place at the height of the controversy over Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, and the edited transcript, appearing in our second issue and including the questions from the floor and the panel's answers, aroused widespread interest and did much to establish the identity and reputation of this magazine.

When I was a young man I hadn't made up my mind whether I was more interested in history or in literature. My undergraduate major was in history, and my M.A. was in creative writing, contemporary literature, and criticism, which at Johns Hopkins was a separate department from English. Meanwhile I was teaching writing, and I had no intention of taking a doctorate in English, which was staffed by as supercilious an array of pedants as ever bristled at the mention of James Joyce or William Faulkner as appropriate subjects for scholarly study. There was in the Johns Hopkins history department, however, a professor who did no such thing, and who was not only interested in the writers of the then modern South but even thought their work might bear relationships to southern history beyond the merely geographical. This was in contrast to the American literature man in the English department, a native of Georgia and editor of a multivolume edition of the writings of Sidney Lanier, who informed me that to use the very term "southern literature" was highly dubious. He, in fact, would be conducting a graduate seminar the following year intended to find out whether there might be such a thing at all. He also told me that the writer I particularly favored at that time, Thomas Wolfe, was not really southern but midwestern in spirit, attitude, and literary approach. So it was to C. Vann Woodward that I applied for admission as a graduate student in history, and was accepted.

Now at that time--1950 to 1951--the Nashville Fugitives and Agrarians and their symposium, I'll Take My Stand, were not being dismissed as a cabal of reactionary worshippers of the ante-bellum South who wished to reactivate the Code Duello and the Dred Scott decision. Instead, they were thought of mainly as bold, if somewhat quixotic, dissenters who had spoken out against the Industrialism and Commercialism of our Big Business Civilization and the looming dehumanization of the individual by the machine. For Woodward's seminar, I set out to write a paper that would show some of the relationships between the poetry and literary criticism of the Fugitives and the history and culture of the South.

This may seem obvious enough now, but at the time no one had written on it. Vann liked the paper very much, he said, but it also appears to have convinced him that literature was what I was most interested in, and that there wasn't much point in my taking courses in the Renaissance, world history, and the like. So he proposed that I do an interdisciplinary...