The Fourth Ghost examines how white Southern writers from the 1930s confronted a crucial question haunting their identities as southerners and coloring their imaginative visions: how did the authoritarianism and the racial politics of European fascism, particularly that of Nazi Germany, relate to southern culture? Writers examined in this wide-ranging study include the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, William Alexander Percy, Lillian Smith, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman.