Birthday: Caroline Gordon, Southerner

Gordon and Tate

Caroline Ferguson Gordon Tate (1895-1981)

Novelist, short story writer

She was unusually well-educated for a Kentucky girl of her time, and after graduating college spent a number of years writing for a Chattanooga newspaper. Returning home, she met a radical young poet, Allen Tate, charming as hell and four years her junior. They married in May 1925 and had a daughter in September.

Tate was a prominent member of the Southern Agrarians, a group of twelve writers- including John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Lytle and Robert Penn Warren- who protested H.L. Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozarts” critique of the South and championed its pastoral society, political conservatism, and religious fervor. They launched a revival of sorts in regional letters, though over the long haul the South embraced modernity- well parts of it- way more than the Agrarians would have liked.

For twenty years, the Tates’ home in Kentucky was a literary salon. Gordon- who wrote under her birth surname- published her first novel, Penhally, in 1931, after much mentoring by the British writer Ford Madox Ford. It did well enough to earn her a Guggenheim fellowship in 1932. A short story won her a 1934 O. Henry Prize, beating out Saroyan, Buck, Caldwell, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Wolfe.

Gordon published fifteen books, five of them novels, and was- in later life, after converting to Catholicism,  a mentor to many writers, including Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. She and Tate divorced in 1945, remarried in 1946, and divorced again in 1959. Writing to the end, Carolina Gordon died shortly after suffering a stroke at the age of 85.