Resonating with the words of black people and white, women and men, the powerless and the powerful, this collection presents the most telling fiction and nonfiction produced in the South over the last 200 years.

The sections of the book - The Old South, The Civil War and Its Consequences, Hard Times, and The Turning - unfold in a compelling record of life below the Mason-Dixon line. Conveying `the passions that have surfaced time and again in more than two hundred years of Southern writing,' the writings explore core themes such as race, religious faith, violence, family, and the Civil War and its aftermath. Works by famous Southern writers (Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, etc.) are interleaved with diaries, journals, memoirs, and manifestos from anonymous people writing about their own lives in their own words. Together, these words document and imagine some of the most dramatic episodes in the nation's life.