How southern writers challenged the nation's view of their region's exceptionalism? How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Leigh Anne Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time.