Not long after the Civil War, in Harris County, Texas,
my father heard a bayou-billy yell out:
Whoopee! Raised in a canebrake and suckled by a she-bear!
The click of a six-shooter is music to my ear!
The further up the creek you go, the worse they git,
And I come from the head of it! Whoopee!
If it were now possible to find some section of country so
far up above the forks of the creek that the owls mate there
with the chickens, and if this section could send to Congress
one of its provincials untainted by the outside world, he
would, if at all intelligent, soon after arriving on Capitol
Hill become aware of interdependencies between his remote
province and the rest of the world.
Biographies of regional characters, stories turning on local
customs, novels based on an isolated society, books of history
and fiction going back to provincial simplicity will go on
being written and published. But I do not believe it possible
that a good one will henceforth come from a mind that does
not in outlook transcend the region on which it is focused.
That is not to imply that the processes of evolution have
brought all parts of the world into such interrelationships
that a writer cannot depict the manners and morals of a
community up Owl Hoot Creek without enmeshing them
with the complexities of the Atlantic Pact.
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