Edith Wharton: America's social critic -- Willa Cather: novelist of the Great Frontier -- Gertrude Stein: the great innovator -- Katherine Ann Porter: "It all happened" -- Zora Neale Hurston: genius of the South -- Pearl Buck: writer of two worlds -- Eudora Welty: capturing the still moment -- Flannery O'Connor: writer of violence and vision.