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Other scholars have also discussed the autobiographical urge in southern writers. “This impulse,” as Lewis P. Simpson argues in Berry’s Home Ground, “reveals itself in more or less incidental ways in the case of white southern writers,” who are less prone to “formal autobiography” (65) but find in novels “the most distinguished fulfillment of the impulse to autobiography” (71). For Simpson, the main reason for this is the inability of authors like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Allen Tate “to reconcile the private and the public significance” of their lives and family history, in which slaves were—though not officially recognized as such—part of the family. Simpson explores “the complex autobiographical fable” of Southern Renaissance writers in his 1994 study The Fable of the Southern Writer (xv), to uncover the autobiographical motive so “compellingly present” in the novels of Faulkner, Madox Roberts, Tate, Warren and Percy. In his entry on “Autobiography” included in The Companion to Southern Literature, Timothy Dow Adams concludes that