C Robin Jordan

As the Great Depression grew steadily worse, writers were no longer interested in rehashing the Civil War. They became more interested in the people of Appalachia, mill workers, and white sharecroppers. In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt identified the South as the number one economic problem in the United States, yet Southern writers were already addressing social issues and change.
Two early influential voices were Edith Summers Kelley and Erskine Caldwell. One of the first novels that focused on poor whites was Weeds by Edith Summers Kelley, published in 1923. Weeds is a novel about a young woman who finds herself in a battle with the confining duties of motherhood and managing an impoverished tenant farm in rural Kentucky.
Edith Summers Kelley struggled for most of her life to become a financially successful writer. In 1906, she moved to New York and became Upton Sinclair’s secretary and part of Sinclair’s Socialist Commune. There, she met Alan Updegraff, whom she later married. After her divorce from Updegraff, she met and married Claude Fred Kelley. From 1914 – 1945, the couple worked as tenant tobacco farmers, alfalfa and chicken ranchers, and as bootleggers. Thus, the life of the protagonist in Weeds was based upon Kelley’s own experiences as an economically depressed rancher.
Erskine Caldwell was possibly the most memorable male writer of the 1920s – 1930s. During his lifetime, he wrote nearly 150 short stories, twelve books of nonfiction, and twenty-five novels. Caldwell’s early stories caught the attention of Maxwell Perkins, senior editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. In 1931, Scribner’s published American Earth, a collection of short stories. The stories in American Earth covered topics, such as the hardships of farming and lynching. Caldwell was concerned with depicting life among poor whites and blacks in the South. By 1940, Caldwell had his most popular novels Tobacco Road, and God’s Little Acre published. Tobacco Road describes the effects of poverty among Georgia tenant farmers during the Great Depression. God’s Little Acre portrays the abuse of southern industrial workers and the destruction of a family.
In his later years, his best writing was considered to be his nonfiction. In 1965, he wrote In Search of Bisco, which dealt with race and reflected his shows his dissatisfaction with the South’s resistance to integration. In 1968, he wrote Deep South, an exploration of religion. It illustrated his frustration with Christians who used their religious faith to oppose social reform.
Northern and Eastern readers defined much of the success of Southern literature. They saw the South as exotic because the stories were full of local color and had strong regional characters that spoke in amusing dialects and had peculiar ways and beliefs. Over time, a growing number of women authors came upon the scene. Soon, women were the dominant writers in the realm of Southern fiction. Four female writers who obtained national attention were Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and Flannery O’Connor.
As a child, while recuperating from a bout of rheumatic fever, Carson McCullers began reading voraciously and considering life as a writer. In the fall of 1936, while recuperating from yet another illness, McCullers began writing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
In 1937, she married James Reeves McCullers, Jr. The marriage was considered to be the most supportive and the most destructive relationship in her life. From the onset, the marriage was plagued by alcoholism, sexual ambivalence and literary jealousy. In 1938, Houghton Mifflin offered McCullers a $500 advance and contract to publish The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. In 1943, Harper’s Bazaar published what many consider McCullers’ finest work, The Ballad of the Sad Café. While it is not an Appalachian story, it is a story of rural life with hillbilly-like characters. The story involves jealousy and obsession in a triangular love relationship.
In the last fifteen years of her life, McCullers’ medical problems and disappointment haunted her. A series of strokes left her bedridden and paralyzed, and she perceived her written works as failures. In August 1967, she suffered her final cerebral stroke. She languished in a coma for forty-six days before she died.
Another Southern writer to achieve national success was Eudora Welty. Welty, often described as genteel and modest by nature. From 1933 – 1936, she worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration in Mississippi. It was during that time Welty, an avid photographer, took her most memorable photographs. Of her photographs, Welty compared her photographic ‘snapshots’ to short stories that if were done properly might capture a moment that could have been lost. She proposed to write a book of short stories to accompany her photographs, but her published informed her there was no market for such a thing. Welty’s photographs are unique in that they capture the human spirit of ordinary people enduring great hardship, in this case the Great Depression. Welty published little from 1955 – 1970, but in 1983, she published One Writer’s Beginnings, a series of three autobiographical pieces.
After the 1930s, Southern literature grew exponentially as it embraced the social and cultural changes inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. There was a noticeable increase of Southern African American female writers. With novels such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, written by African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, the world began to hear from a new perspective, the perspective of a black woman.
Hurston was an intelligent, big-boned woman with an infectious sense of humor. She was considered to be both hotheaded and rambunctious. With her confident nature, Hurston elbowed her way into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and became friends with poet Langston Hughes and writer/actress Ethel Waters. Despite the fact she rarely drank, Hurston was the life of every party. Yet, she never let that interfere with her writing. At times, she would be writing in her bedroom while a party went on in the living room.
Prior to 1935, she published several short stories, articles, and a collection of black Southern folklore. In 1937, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct research in Jamaica and Haiti. Also, in 1937 she published Their Eyes Were Watching God. In that novel, Hurston wove a tale of love, independence, and judgment. While the novel is her best-known work, there were critics of it who disliked the dialect used by Southern blacks of African and Caribbean descent, but no one found fault with Hurston’s lyrical voice.
Despite Hurston’s prolific writing, the most she received for her work was $943.75. To pay for her funeral, friends took up a collection, but the collection was not sufficient to pay for a headstone. Buried in an unmarked grave in 1960, Hurston did not receive a tombstone until 1973.
Flannery O’Connor is thought of as one of America’s greatest fiction writers. In much of her work she emphasized sin, guilt, and alienation. When she was fifteen, her father died of lupus. In 1945, O’Connor began her academic studies at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa). Not enjoying her studies in journalism, she asked Paul Engle, head of the Writer’s Workshop, if she could enter the master’s program in creative writing. Her request was granted.
While there, she got to know Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Andrew Lytle, who was for many years the editor of the Sewanee Review. After leaving the university, she continuing working on her first novel, Wise Blood, while at Yaddo Writer’s Colony in New York. It was published in 1952. From 1952 – 1955, she wrote a collection of short stories, which included A Good Man is Hard to Find.
In 1950, O’Connor came down with systemic lupus erythematous, the same illness that killed her father. With her health failing, O’Connor and her mother moved to Andalusia, the family farm just outside of Midgeville, Georgia. O’Connor lived there for the rest of her life. Despite her illness, she continued to write and took frequent trips to lecture and read from her works. In 1964, her lupus, which had gone into remission, reappeared after surgery for a fibroid tumor. For several months, her health continued to decline. Completed just before her death, Everything that Rises Must Converge was O’Connor’s second collection of short stories. It was published posthumously in 1965. She was awarded the National Book Award posthumously in 1972 for Collected Stories.
Through the pioneering efforts of the writers previously mentioned, and others, Southern literature established a place in the history of American letters. Their efforts opened the doors for other writers to pass through. New writers continued adding to the already outstanding body of Southern literature, writers such as James Agee and Harper Lee.
In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Fortune photographer Walker Evans lived with sharecroppers in Alabama. In 1941, Agee wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from those experiences. However, it only sold 600 copies. In the 1940s, Agee was one of the most important film critics in the country. He was also a respected screenwriter, and in the 1950s adapted The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter for film. When Agee was fifteen, his father died in an automobile accident. That singular event was a pivotal moment for Agee, and later in life, it would lead him to write his autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family. It was a portrait of life showing how the loss of husband and father affected the widow and his children. A Death in the Family won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958, after Agee’s premature death in 1955. Ironically, Agee died from a heart attack in the back of a cab while on his way to visit his doctor.
Another major Southern literature novel was To Kill a Mockingbird, written by Harper Lee. Completed in 1959 and published in 1960, many of the details of the novel appear to be autobiographical. Since the publishing of To Kill a Mockingbird, which won a Pulitzer in 1961, Lee has given virtually no appearances or interviews, and with the exception of a few essays, has had nothing else published.

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At this point, I would like to speak a bit on the core members of the Fugitive Movement.

John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom was the informal leader of the Fugitives. He entered Vanderbilt University at the age of fifteen, and taught at Vanderbilt from 1914 to 1937. Later, he became a professor at Kenyon College where he founded the Kenyon Review.

For his part, Ransom once wrote that those who wanted to build a New South on a northern model had to support southern traditions. In essence, he felt that urbanization caused more problems than it solved. As a poet, Ransom produced the bulk of his poetry while teaching at Vanderbilt. In his best-known poem, Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter, the death of a child was a dramatic moment of fate that strikes us all.

During his years at Vanderbilt, Ransom was one of the first academics in the United States to establish the importance of the poet and critic in English departments which until that time favored instructors who taught in the disciples of philological and historical studies. He is still arguably one of the South’s most influential literary critics and teachers.

Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson received his undergraduate degree and his master’s degree from Vanderbilt. He held four honorary doctorates and taught at Vanderbilt University his entire career. He was also a part of the Southern Agrarian movement and was a key figure in publishing I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays that bemoaned southern industrialization and urbanization.

Davidson shared the Agrarian distaste for industrialization and its effects on American culture. Despite the fact he was a lifelong proponent of segregation, he found the Fugitive gatherings and critiques to be important, because the severity of the discipline made them self-conscious craftsmen, aware of the harsh process of revision. In 1931, Davidson began a long association with Middlebury College in Vermont and was a key member of the Bread Loaf School of English. Today, the annual Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference is one of the most prestigious writing conferences in the United States.

John Orley Allen Tate

Allen Tate began attending Vanderbilt in 1918. He was a classmate with, and roommate of, Robert Penn Warren. At the invitation of Donald Davidson, Tate became a member of the Fugitives. In 1928, Tate received a Guggenheim Fellowship that took him abroad, which gave him the chance to travel to Paris, meet Gertrude Stein, and strike up a friendship with Ernest Hemingway. When he returned to the United States, he embraced agrarianism and contributed to I’ll Take My Stand. Six years later, he wrote a conservative and critical response to Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Tate’s poetry was considered traditional in form. As a fan of agrarianism, his most famous poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead, reflected those feelings. Tate’s only novel, The Fathers, was published in 1938. Within a year, Tate was the poet-in-residence at Princeton. While there, he founded the school’s Creative Writing program. In 1943, he became the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, and in 1944, the editor of the Sewanee Review. Today, the Sewanee Review is America’s oldest literary quarterly and considered to be one of the most prestigious quarterly magazines in the country.

Robert Penn Warren

The youngest member of the Fugitives, Robert Penn Warren, would become its most famous member. Warren entered Vanderbilt in 1921 and began contributing poetry to the Fugitives on a regular basis. In 1925, he graduated from Vanderbilt. Immediately named a Rhodes Scholar, he studied at Oxford. When he returned to the United States, he accepted a teaching position at Vanderbilt, where he taught from 1931 – 1934. While at Vanderbilt, Warren contributed his essay, The Briar Patch, to I’ll Take My Stand. In his essay, he defended agrarianism and racial segregation. Later in his life, he would change his personal and philosophical views.

In 1938, Warren and critic Cleanth Brooks co-wrote the textbook Understanding Poetry, which was widely accepted and used at universities across the United States. In 1942, the two again collaborated and wrote Understanding Fiction, another textbook that was well received and used in colleges. Published in 1939, Night Rider was Warren’s first novel. It was about the tobacco war between independent tobacco growers in Kentucky and large tobacco corporations.

Throughout his career, Warren took a strong interest in Southern history. His novel, All the King’s Men reiterated that theme and won a Pulitzer in 1947. It was about a progressive, yet corrupt, governor that had to confront complex personalities, moral decisions and his own new self-awareness. In 1958, he won another Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his collection of poems, Promises: Poems 1954 – 1956, and yet another Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for Now and Then: Poems 1976 – 1978. In 1967, he won the Bolligen Prize in Poetry. In 1980, Warren received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1981, he received the MacArthur Prize Fellowship. In 1986, he became the first poet laureate of the United States.

Ultimately, the Fugitive Movement gave way to Agrarianism and then to the New Criticism Movement. In the New Criticism Movement, literary works were considered self-contained, devoid of any consideration for the reader’s response, author’s intentions, or historical significance. The New Criticism movement was the dominant mode of literary analysis from the 1920s through the 1940s.

Later, more to come on the evolution of Southern Literature.