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Bill J. Berry, noted scholar and the editor of Home Ground: Southern Autobiography (1991), has also written about the autobiographical impulse of southerners. In his entry on “Autobiographical Impulse,” printed first in Southern Cultures (2000) and later included in Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda H. MacKethan’s The Companion to Southern Literature (2002), he traces its origins and notes its differences with the general American autobiographical impulse, more concerned with the exaltation of the individual than with the celebration of community, as in the case of southern autobiography, however tragic and painful this aspect might have been historically. “Of the existence of an impulse,” according to Berry, “there can be little doubt. It helps explain the meandering, anecdotal style of southern conversation. It’s central to the southern habit of storytelling” (78). Although Berry acknowledges that autobiography may well be the dominant form of expression in American literature, he also suggests that southern autobiography represents what one might call, for better or worse, the Mason-Dixon version of a national model of personal narrative. For Berry, “southern personal narrative is a conversation, often heated, within the self, between the self and the community, between the South and the country, and with those outsiders within, the other race” (79).