1. Wilbur Joseph Cash was himself a Southerner who was born in South Carolina in 1900, and his book The Mind of the South is written from the perspective of a returning native coming back home to examine the culture that he finds there. His book is rather bitter in the way it analyzes what the author sees as the failures of the South and lays bare the development of its anti-intellectual and excessively romantic traditions. He discusses Southern literature at one point and notes the forces shaping writers like William Faulkner and Taylor Caldwell, and it is evident that Cash himself is shaped by many of these same forces and that he has the same love-hate relationship with the South as they did. He is fully aware of the reality of how these critics of the South actually view the South:
In reality the hated the South a good deal less than they said and thought. Rather, so far as their hatred was not mere vain profession designed to invite attention to their own superior perception, they hated it with the exasperated hate of a lover who cannot persuade the object of his affections to his desire. Or, perhaps more accurately, as Narcissus, growing at length analytical, might have suddenly begun to hate his image reflected in the pool (377).
Faulkner understood the forces shaping the South as does Cash, and both men see their contemporary South as having been shaped by the past to a great degree, so much so that the heritage of slavery and the Civil War was something the South could not escape and did not know how to assimilate in a less painful way.
Yet, Cash is more despairing of the South than even Faulkner seems to be. The title of his book is revealing, for it is truly about the "mind" of the South, the attitude and the mindset that prevails among the people of this part of the country. Cash not only details what this mindset might be but tries to ascertain some of the reasons why this mindset has developed. It is cl...