PERSPECTIVEnAnarchy and Family in the Southern TraditionnFor this issue of Chronicles we have assembled the thingnin and of itself, examples of Southern literature as it isnhere and now, a couple of appropriate poems and a work ofnfiction by one of the South’s finest writers, together withnsome good talk about contemporary letters in the South. Inwould rather not be redundant (the rhetorical effect ofnwhich is always to generate a chorus of huge yawns amongnreaders); so I will here merely point out that most of thenquestions and some of the answers about the nature ofnSouthern literature, past and present, are at least touched onnin the pieces that follow. Perhaps most interestingly,nR.H.W. Dillard’s new poem, “Poe at the End,” and FrednChappell’s long story/short novel (shall we go ahead and callnit a novella? Why not?), “Ancestors,” using both fact andnfable, directly address the happy and probably insolublenproblem of defining Southern literature. Among othernthings.nI commend each and all of these pieces to you. Includingnthe work by Dillard and Chappell, and the poem by JamesnSeay, we have work by the latest generation of Southernnwriters, all of them already established and altogether likelynto be at once active and influential in the decade ahead andnthe early years of the new century. That gives us, notncounting the newest of the new and the youngest of thenyoung, three living generations of Southern writers. Al-nGeorge Garrett’s most recent novel is Entered From thenSun, published last fall by Doubleday. He lives innCharlottesville and holds a chair at the University ofnVirginia.n14/CHRONICLESnby George Garrettnnnthough we have lost Robert Penn Warren and Walker Percynwe still have so many others around and about: AndrewnLytic and Cleanth Brooks, for example; Eudora Welty andnPeter Taylor and Shelby Foote, for instance, each having bynnow earned more than regional honors and recognition.nWhen you think of all these, together with many others, ansurprising number, at one end of the living tradition and, atnthe other, the younger writers who are gathered here andnrepresent their own generation, you have a sense of thencontinuity and variety of the Southern tradition in our time.nMissing, but their long shadows remain, are a crowd, a cloudnof elders and witnesses who link the great flowering ofnSouthern writing in this century to its historical and literarynpast: first and foremost, of course William Faulkner, whonmapped the territory for us even as, in different forms andnstrange contexts, he influenced and changed the literature ofnthe wide world in all its babbling languages; the great andngreatly influential Agrarians and Fugitives — Tate and Ransomnand Donald Davidson .and Carolyn Gordon andnBrooks and Warren, and, of course, their own pupils, peoplenlike James Dickey and Randall Jarrell and Madison Jones;nthe remarkable independents, people like Thomas Striblingnand Stark Young and John Gould Fletcher; the firstngeneration of women who made their way, and their living,nas writers — Ellen Glasgow and Mary Johnston and ElizabethnMadox Roberts and Evelyn Thomson and so manynothers, not least among them being Margaret Mitchell. Andnall of this should not slight or ignore the no-longer separatenand equal tradition of black Southern writing, from, say,nRalph Ellison (who sometimes identifies himself as an