This innovative book charts what had been a largely unexplored literary landscape, Thomas Haddox looks at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole to trace the ways Catholics and their Church have been a presence in the southern cultural tradition. Haddox explores the association of Catholicism with such themes as miscegenation, patriarchy, aestheticism, and decadence, offering a more nuanced understanding of the changing intersections of religion, culture, region, and history in the American South.