Caroline Gordon: A Biography

Caroline Gordon was the author of nine novels, three collections of short stories, and two critical works. Although her considerable contributions to modern Southern American fiction in themselves merit a biography, her life is actually more interesting, indeed fascinating, for two other reasons. First, as the wife of poet and critic Allen Tate, Gordon was intimately connected with the Fugitives and Agrarians, particularly Robert Penn Warren and Andrew Lytle. As the Fugitives expanded their vision from Southern to modernistic approaches to literature, so did Gordon's circle of friends grow to include Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, William Faulkner, and many others. Even more intriguing is Gordon's story as a woman, a Southerner, and a writer, categories as often mutually exclusive as synergistic for her. The biography examines the price Gordon paid in both the artistic and personal spheres as she attempted to have it all - the image of the Southern belle, the writer-husband, and a writing career.