Among the qualities associated with the US South to bolster the claim of regional distinctiveness, aversion to the life of the mind is commonly deployed. Famously or infamously, depending on the perspective, H. L. Mencken used this marker to map the South as a cultural wasteland populated by abjectly ignorant rubes. Ironically, W. J. Cash's landmark study The Mind of the South (1941) goes against the titular grain to demonstrate that the “mind” is really made of heart and soul. Cash's prototypical southerner acts on passion, faith, and temperament rather than reason. Even now, as scholars vigorously interrogate southern exceptionalism founded on assertions of essential(ist) regional traits, the allegedly uncurious South pervades media narratives as evinced by discussions of the Tea Party as a decidedly southern-accented national political phenomenon – Cash's southern “savage ideal” writ large. This extensive cultural history makes Tara Powell's The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature seem both timely and long overdue. In this thorough and insightful study, Powell analyzes selected southern authors and texts to make the claim that “the agrarian tradition combined in distinctive ways with the peculiar institution of slavery and the southern literary tradition to promote the stereotype of southerners and even southern literature being notably, even fiercely, “anti-intellectual’” (1). In spite of its resonance, Powell contends, “the southern anti-intellectual trope has never been facile, singular, or static” (1). To explore this conceptual malleability, Powell focusses on late twentieth-century southern authors who write at the intersection of regional and academic discourses assumed to be in opposition, “to play on the older southern anti-intellectual trope in new ways” (2).

The book consists of seven chapters, the first of which lays crucial groundwork for the entire study. Through deft synthesis of material, Powell traces the cultural history of the anti-intellectual trope, identifying three types of southern intellectual that take shape: the “masked,” the “exiled,” and the “dysfunctional.” Powell extends this line from Thomas Jefferson to the Southern Agrarians and Cash, relying quite heavily on Michael O'Brien's work on southern intellectual history. At one point, Powell acknowledges that this approach

Significantly, Powell adds that such a project need not be “hostile” to recent critical trends in southern studies “treating regional identity as an ideology about experience rather than necessarily a reflection of an actually exceptional South” (20). Indeed, readers in search of a study that troubles and is troubled by conventional regional paradigms will have to look elsewhere, for Powell assumes a rather stable conception of “the South” while still allowing for individual writers’ perspectives on what regional identity and affiliation might mean.

The remaining chapters cover a diverse range of southern authors and texts brought together by Powell's claim that they share a proclivity for transforming the marginalized status of intellectuals in the South into productive space for creativity. Flannery O'Connor, for example, occupies a liminal space from which to gather the fruits and skewer the follies of intellectuals even as her authorial status leaves her at times vulnerable to the same alienated stance cultivated by the posers whom she indicts. Powell convincingly argues for Walker Percy's vocational ambivalence, examining how he resituated southern literature from rural to urban environs in New South “novels of ideas” and published essays on linguistics, all the while eschewing the mantle of public intellectual in the South (21). For authors such as Doris Betts, Tim McLaurin, and Gail Godwin, who emerged as southern writers after creative writing programs had become firmly established, occupying margins informed by gender and class dynamics involves trying to navigate southern institutional settings and “off-campus” locales that may be in close geographical proximity to one another but seem worlds apart (21). Powell's excellent chapter on Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and Randall Keenan clearly demonstrates how these African American writers in the South revise and extend the black literacy narrative tradition to work against anti-intellectual currents originating from sources outside and within rural black communities.

Though Powell opens and closes The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature with anecdotal evidence that the “anti-intellectual South” remains a persistent trope, she does well to resist taking a stand as regional defender or apologist. Rather than set out to disprove the anti-intellectual charge by “proving” the South's intellectual merits, Powell demonstrates how representative writers and thinkers have drawn inspiration and purpose from the assumption that what they do in pursuing the life of the mind is fundamentally incompatible with southern experience and identity.