Dr. Gardner surveys the changes wrought by World War II to the book industry in general and to the southern renaissance in particular. Taking Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, both published in 1944, as case studies and expanding out, Dr. Gardner argues that during the 1940s the South came to occupy a different literary position in the minds of industry insiders. The war changed which books were produced, how they were produced, and the ways they were pitched to an expanding market that demanded reading material that explained new wartime realities. In this climate, few southern titles fit the bill. It also notes the ways in which the industry itself had changed. Southerners continued to publish fiction, of course, but by the 1940s there was hardly anything new about the overturning of the moonlight and magnolia school of southern letters. Renaissances cannot continue forever. Southern authors still might have something new to say, but that was no longer revolutionary. The modern literary marketplace that had emerged in the 1920s and 1930s looked markedly different in the 1940s and 1950s. The war might not have signaled the death of Dixie, as some prognosticators had suggested, but it did signal the death of the southern literary renaissance.