of Cash's oversights: [H]e knew nothing of the Charleston, New Orleans and Mobile antebellum planter-merchant classes and little about the sugar and cotton barons who established vast landed estates and built elaborate mansions along the lower Mississippi River. The Blue Grass of Kentucky and the Nashville Basin and the wire grass of Alabama were equally beyond his ken. Even so, according to Wyatt-Brown, "Cash's major contribution is his exposition of Southern cultural and class patterns... [and] he also has important things to suggest regarding matters of gender and race." He describes The Mind of the South as "more than a social thesis that uses a slightly eccentric methodology. It is a great and brilliantly crafted work in the tradition of the literature of moral advocacy... [which] is Southern in every line." He quotes literary historian Richard H. King as writing that Cash "fuses the Southern capacity for rhetorical extravagance with the less typical capacity for satire and irony. The result is a masterpiece of discursive prose, stylistically one of the most sophisticated works in American historiography." The penultimate paragraph from The Mind of the South is often cited as a distillation of the entire book: Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action -- such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism – these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today. Legacy Two biographies of Cash have been published, W. J. Cash: Southern Prophet, by Joseph L. Morrison (Knopf, 1967), and W. J. Cash: A Life, by Bruce Clayton (L.S.U. Press, 1991). In 1991, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Mind of the South, two widely-hailed seminars on the South and the impact through time of Cash's book on the South were held at