Southern Renaissance

The second theme was to focus on the South's conservative culture, specifically on how an individual could exist without losing a sense of identity in a region where family, religion, and community were more highly valued than one's personal and social life.

In the 1890s, the writings of journalist Walter Hines Page and academics William Peterfield Trent and John Spencer Bassett severely criticized the cultural and intellectual mediocrity of the men who held power in the South.

In 1903, Basset, an academic at Trinity College (later Duke University) angered many influential white Southerners when he called African-American leader Booker T. Washington "the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years.

"[2] The most comprehensive and outspoken criticisms directed against the tenets of the "Lost Cause" before the First World War were put forth by African-American writers who grew up in the South, most famously by Charles W. Chesnutt in his novels The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901).

[5] The start of the Southern Renaissance is often traced back to the activities of "The Fugitives", a group of poets and critics who were based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, just after the First World War.

"[6] The emergence of the Southern Renaissance as a literary and cultural movement has also been seen as a consequence of the opening up of the predominantly rural South to outside influences due to the industrial expansion that took place in the region during and after the First World War.