Mr. Rubin had heart and kidney ailments, his brother, Manning, said in confirming the death.  After starting his professional life as a journalist, a trade he once described as a âliterary entree, the chance to commence a vocation in writing,â Mr. Rubin eventually found newspaper work stifling and turned to literature.  He wrote three novels himself, which drew on his own upbringing as a Jew in the South between the world wars: âThe Golden Weatherâ (1961), âSurfaces of a Diamondâ (1981) and âThe Heat of the Sunâ (1995). He also wrote personal histories, including âAn Honorable Estateâ (2001), a memoir of his newspaper days, and âMy Fatherâs People: A Family of Southern Jewsâ (2002).  But in a life of prolific production â he wrote or edited more than 30 books â his greatest contribution was as a cultural historian and critic who became, as the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities described him, âperhaps the person most responsible for the emergence of Southern literature as a field of scholarly inquiry.â  In 1953, Mr. Rubin edited, with Robert D. Jacobs, a collection of essays, âSouthern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South,â which many critics have considered seminal in the definition of Southern writing as a distinct regional literature. The two edited a second collection, âSouth: Modern Literature in Its Cultural Setting,â in 1961.  Among Mr. Rubinâs own critical works are âThomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youthâ; âThe Wary Fugitives,â a study of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson and Robert Penn Warren, four of the poets who established the literary magazine Fugitive at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s; and âThe Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South,â a 1963 collection that includes essays about William Faulknerâs legacy and the promise of a young William Styron.  Over more than three decades of teaching, first at Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Virginia and later at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was mentor to a host of writers with distinctive Southern voices and now familiar names, among them Annie Dillard, Lee Smith, Kaye Gibbons and Jill McCorkle.  With another student, Shannon Ravenel, Mr. Rubin founded Algonquin Books in his Chapel Hill home in 1983. Created to be a hospitable alternative to the publishing houses at the insular nexus of the industry in New York, Algonquin has published dozens of writers of fiction and nonfiction, both Southern and not, and even a few New Yorkers.  In the opening essay of âFaraway Country,â Mr. Rubin wrote about what he considered the characteristics of modern Southern literature. As the 20th century proceeded, he suggested, Southern writers felt themselves both part of and apart from the rest of American culture. And perhaps counterintuitively, he posited Mark Twain â who grew up in Hannibal, in northern Missouri, in the 19th century â as nonetheless âthe prototype of the Southern writers of our time.â  âLike them he grew up in a small, contained community, and like them he was propelled by his art and his times far beyond that community,â Mr. Rubin wrote. âWestward and then eastward he went, into the busy life of post-Civil War industrial America. By the accident of American history the country of Northern Missouri was not allowed to remain sleepy, Southern and contained; indeed, the economic and political forces that destroyed agrarian America were already at work during his boyhood.  âOnly in the Confederate South was the industrialization of America arrested, by the military and economic defeat of the War, and communities like Mark Twainâs Hannibal allowed to exist for another half-century. Not until the 20th century did the South feel importantly the effects of the industrialization that was changing the face of American life. Then it too produced distinguished writers whose art mirrored the transition of one kind of life to another.â  Louis Decimus Rubin Jr. was born in Charleston, S.C., on Nov. 19, 1923. His father, Henry, was an electrical contractor whose business foundered during the Depression but who, after moving to Richmond, had a second career as a popular amateur meteorologist known in Virginia as the Weather Wizard.  Young Louis spent two years at the University of Charleston and then served in the Army during World War II, working for the base newspaper at Fort Benning, Ga. After the war he finished his bachelorâs degree at the University of Richmond and then worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers in New Jersey and Virginia and for The Associated Press.  He later entered the writing program at Johns Hopkins, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D. (His Thomas Wolfe book began as his dissertation.)  In addition to his brother, Mr. Rubin is survived by his wife, Eva Redfield, whom he met at Johns Hopkins and married in 1951; a sister, Joan Schoenes; two sons, Robert and William; and two grandchildren.  âThe nature of the daily editorial format was inhibiting me from communicating the complexity of a topic,â Mr. Rubin wrote about why he gave up journalism for the literary life. In his later work he indeed did not shy from the complexities of Southern culture, including its painfully ingrained racial prejudice, even when examining himself. Looking back on his return to the South after his sojourn in New Jersey, he chastised himself for having idealized the region.  âI had even rationalized myself into believing â more accurately, into thinking I believed â that Southern racial arrangements were something other than the flagrant injustice they were to black Southerners,â he wrote. âI donât think I was really a segregationist, but such was my sense of alienation from the urban metropolitan milieu I now found myself inhabiting that I had managed to persuade myself that the recent Brown v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court was â well, not so much wrong as premature, too far ahead of its time. Such was the power of nostalgia and the wish to Go Home Again.â
Mr. Rubin, a man of letters who helped found Algonquin Books, was devoted to the practice and promotion of American Southern writing.