culture, received wide critical acclaim at the time and garnered for Cash praise from such sources as Time, The New York Times, The Saturday Review of Literature, and most Southern newspapers of note, although criticism came from the Agrarian group out of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Cash also received the thanks of Walter White, the director of the NAACP, for the book's liberalism in regard to race and its exposure of the bigotry of the South. Time said of The Mind of the South "Anything written about the South henceforth must start where [Cash] leaves off." In Mexico In March 1941, largely on the strength of the critical success of the book, Cash was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which included a small stipend which would allow him to spend a year writing a novel about the progress of three generations of a Southern cotton mill family, like his own, from the Old South into the modern era. Cash had always considered himself to be superior at writing fiction to non-fiction, as he stated in his October, 1940 application to the Guggenheim Foundation, and so he embraced with great eagerness the opportunity to try his hand at a novel for a year. Cash had made, first in 1932, then in 1936, two previous applications for Guggenheim grants: the first to have been a study of Lafcadio Hearn, to have been titled "Anatomy of a Romantic," using Hearn as an exemplar by which to study Southern romantics generally, and the second to have been a study of the Nazi mindset by spending a year in Germany, a contrasting reprise of Cash's bicycle tour of pre-Nazi Europe during the summer of 1927. Likely because of Cash's lack of a published major work at the time, both applications were rejected. The third and successful application was sponsored by the Knopfs and by Raleigh News & Observer editor and Guggenheim recipient, Jonathan W. Daniels, who had befriended Cash in 1938. The Fellowship carried with it great prestige, Cash being placed in the select company of Daniels, Thomas Wolfe, and playwright Paul Green, as the only North Carolinians to have received the grant by 1941. Cash and his wife chose Mexico to spend their year on the Fellowship because it was cheap to live there, and they would have to watch every penny; they embarked on their trip to Mexico City on May 30 1941. Cash