The Southern Press: Literary Legacies and the Challenge of Modernity

The Southern Press suggests that the South’s journalism struck a literary pose closer to the older English press than to the democratic penny press or bourgeois magazines of the urban North. The Southern journalist was more likely to be a Romantic and an intellectual. The region’s journalism was personal, colorful, and steeped in the classics. News was less important than narrative. Neither ‘public’ nor ‘opinion’ had much meaning in a racially segregated South. Paradoxically, it was this nonreformist literary tradition that produced liberal southern editors, from Henry Grady to Ralph McGill, who were viewed in the North as both explainers of and dissidents from the South.