It was no ordinary book, that collection of impassioned essays published on November 12, 1930. In the pitch and stress of the Great Depression, I'll Take My Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition, created by twelve Southerners, proved to be a prophetic confrontation, no mere “ineffectual lamentation of some impractical neo-Confederates over the passing of the golden age of slavery.” It represented, as Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Southern literary historian and critic, put it, “the first stages of a widespread revolt against computerized, depersonalized, machine-oriented society and its ruthless exploitation of the environment and its human inhabitants.”