American novelists and writers have found the plantation-slave régime and the romantic aspects of planter life so intriguing that they perhaps unintentionally have led the reading public to accept these as the whole picture of southern life in the days of slavery. The business man seems foreign to such a traditional picture and his activities less picturesque than those of planter, slave, or poor white. Seemingly, only the heroic proportions of an Anthony Adverse or a Rhett Butler can lift the business theme to a plane where it can compete with the other actors in the drama of the traditional South.