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The planter aristocracy has appeared in literature at least since John Pendleton Kennedy published Swallow-Barn in 1832 and in his genial portrait of Frank Meriwether presiding over his plantation dominion initiated the most persistent tradition of Southern literature.

The thoroughgoing idealization of the planter society did not come, however, until after the Civil War when Southern writers were eager to defend a way of life which had been destroyed.

As they looked with nostalgia to a society which had been swept away, they were probably no more than half-conscious that they painted in colors which had never existed.

Their books found no less willing readers outside than inside the South, even while memories of the war were still sharp.

The tradition reached its apex, perhaps, in the works of Thomas Nelson Page toward the end of the century, and reappeared undiminished as late as 1934 in the best-selling novel So Red The Rose, by Stark Young.

Although Faulkner was the heir in his own family to this tradition, he did not have Stark Young's inclination to romanticize and sentimentalize the planter society.