So Red the Rose, however, remains a work of some power; and Young's fiction still possesses historical interest for the basic tensions that it displays and for the author's connection with the agrarians, to whose manifesto he contributed.
Young was born in the village of Como in the cotton country of northern Mississippi. His father, Alfred Alexander Young, a Civil War veteran, was a courtly country doctor, and his mother, Mary Clark Starks, was a member of the McGehee family, which had been one of the powerful dynasties of the Deep South and which would come to represent for Young the best in Southern agrarian values. This family became especially important to the child after his mother's death when he was nine, and the loyalty, affection, and gratitude that Young felt for the McGehees would later be a central element in all of his novels.
When Young was fourteen, his father married again, and the family moved to the university town of Oxford. By this time, the boy had also been confronted with another facet of his native agrarian tradition. Though the McGehees had surrounded him with what he would later call "the life of the affections," their tradition also contained a bias hostile to his own artistic nature.
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