Distinguished by witty repartee and insightful observations, Two Scholarly Friends captures the intellectual energy that fueled a long-lasting friendship between two of South Carolina's most influential thinkers and illumines South Carolina's intellectual development during the first decades of this century.
The quintessential Southern gentleman, Yates Snowden was a revered professor at the University of South Carolina and the preeminent historian of the state in the early decades of this century. John Bennett, an author-artist from Ohio, was a co-founder of the Poetry Society of South Carolina and a central figure in the Charleston Renaissance. Both former newspapermen, Snowden and Bennett wrote each other regularly about their research on the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, their often antagonistic views on the arts, their scholarship on the Gullah language, and their views on the South's cultural and intellectual development.
Mary Crow Anderson is a former professor at the University of South Carolina.