Caroline Gordon , novelist, short-story writer, and teacher of writers, is best known as a member of the Southern Renaissance, that literary phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s which centered about the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians in Nashville,...

Although Caroline Gordon was far more productive as a novelist than as a short-story writer (she published nine novels and two story collections--not including her Collected Stories [1981]--plus a smattering of other stories), her critical reputation...

Caroline Gordon visited France twice during the twenties and thirties, in 1928-1929 and again in 1932-1933. She wrote much of her first two novels while living abroad, and she and her husband, poet Allen Tate, took an active part in the social and...

Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old w...

Miss Gordon's [early] stories rest on what were, at the time of their composition, relatively secure philosophical foundations, while her later works, including novels as well as short stories, are both structurally and texturally more complicated as a defense against those hostile armies which have appeared at the gates in ever-increasing numbers since the publication of The Forest of the South…. The philosophical assumptions to which I refer are ontological and define man's place in t...

[Miss Gordon] is a conscious heiress to what is probably the central tradition of modern fiction, which we can refer to, following some of its great practitioners, as the Impressionist novel…. Miss Gordon is more than the follower of a tradition; indeed, her innovations are bold and far-reaching. But she often works out her devices with an eye on the masters whom she honors. (pp. 279-80) Her method, if we may call it that, consists in subtly adjusting her prose medium to her subject. If she were a Re...