Southern Writers and the Machine: Faulkner to Percy traces the artistic treatment of mechanization among two generations of Southern writers. The book studies the artistic and philosophical responses to the increasing mechanization of the South in the work of Faulkner, Tate, O'Connor, Styron, Gaines, and Percy. It argues that these writers were working within a self-conscious aesthetic tradition which evolved out of the southern writer’s unique position in relation to a past traditional order and a rapidly emerging future industrial society. The book breaks new ground by analyzing in close detail the relationship between the historical fact of mechanization and the artistic strategies employed in response to it.