Volume 36, Number 3 · March 2, 1989
The United Tates
By Monroe K. Spears
Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance
by Ann Waldron
Putnam's, 416 pp., $22.95
The Lytle-Tate Letters: The Correspondence of Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate
edited by Thomas Daniel Young, edited by Elizabeth Sarcone
University Press of Mississippi, 395 pp., $37.50
Ann Waldron's excellent life of Caroline Gordon is the most intelligent and readable biography yet to appear of any writer of the Southern Renaissance. It tells a story fascinating in human terms, even if the reader has no interest whatever in that literary movement. To me Ms. Waldron's book was a delight and a revelation, for, though Allen Tate was my friend during the last three decades of his life, I never met Caroline Gordon and knew of their life together only at second hand. This book fills in many blanks, explains many hints and allusions. But one of its strengths is that it does not attempt to explain everything: Ms. Waldron is perceptive about her subjects and understands the complex relations among them remarkably well; but she never pretends to explain them completely.
Review, 4303 words
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