In 1933, the United States Congress created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as part of the New Deal, beginning one of the largest hydroelectric construction programs in American history across the Tennessee River Valley. The TVA built a series of dams that generated enormous quantities of electrical power and distributed it to a region that had been among the most poorly electrified in the nation. This massive program of electrical infrastructure, spanning parts of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, brought modern electrical power to millions of rural Americans for the first time.

The TVA's electrification of the rural South directly inspired some of the most important American literature of the 1930s and beyond. James Agee's and Walker Evans's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941), a landmark of American literary journalism, documented the lives of Southern sharecropper families in the very region the TVA was transforming. The bringing of electric light to isolated mountain cabins became a symbol of both the promise and the disruption of modernization that pervades Southern literature from the Agrarian writers to Flannery O'Connor, who explored what was gained and lost when electrical power arrived in the rural South.