(Using classic examples in literture, Gordon moves from th...)
Using classic examples in literture, Gordon moves from the value and danger of first person narrative to the importance of complication and resolution. Writing in the era of what her close friend, Flannery O'Connor called the Christ-haughted South, she also explains in detail why good fiction deals with theft, and rape, and murder. It is true to life, and if a novel isn't true to life, then it has no value.
(One of the most remarkable novels every written by an Ame...)
One of the most remarkable novels every written by an American woman about women. First published in 1943, the story follows a woman's flight from Manhattan and her unfaithful husband to her rural ancestral home. Southern Classics Series.
(This narrative of a landed Kentucky family, traced over f...)
This narrative of a landed Kentucky family, traced over four generations, shows the decline of its patriarchal order, overwhelmed in the twentieth century by an irresponsible individualism. “The best American novel I know.”—Ford Madox Ford. Southern Classics Series.
The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon (FSG Classics)
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The complete collection of short fiction from a literar...)
The complete collection of short fiction from a literary stylist who captured the nuances of life in the American South of the early twentieth century, The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon is firmly rooted in the traditions, the social habits, and the land itself. As Robert Penn Warren writes in his introduction, "Caroline Gordon's world lies in southeast Kentucky . . . She displays a disciplined style as unpretentious and clear as running water, but shot through with glints of wit, humor, pity, and poetry. She had the rare gift of the teller of the tale."
(This tragic novel traces the barbarization of the white s...)
This tragic novel traces the barbarization of the white settlers of the Appalachian frontier, culminating in the destruction of the Cherokee nation and the moral corruption of its conquerors. Southern Classics Series.
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“It is, in a sense, a prose Aeneid, written with so muc...)
“It is, in a sense, a prose Aeneid, written with so much economy and constraint that the reader is only aware at the end that he has been following the wanderings of a hero.” Thus did Andrew Nelson Lytle, in a 1934 New Republic review, capture the essence of Caroline Gordon’s novel inspired by the life of her father, a supreme hunter and fisherman.
Caroline Gordon wanted to call her novel “The Life and Passion of Aleck Maury,” an apt title for the story of a man passionately drawn to the rites, rituals, and excitement of hunting and fishing. Gordon describes these rituals with a precision that even Hemingway would admire. The result, as Lytle points out, is that she makes “hunting and angling appear so exciting that a reader who has never had a gun or rod in his hand will not lay down the book until he has reached the end.”
Aleck Maury earned his living as a professor of classics, but found books and classes pale in comparison with blood sport. Only in the world of sport is Maury truly alive, for only there are the rules exact; in the world of sport Maury is an artist, a creator in control. He prepares until he is ready, then tries his hand at the game. The rituals of blood sport lend structure to his life. From these rituals come elation, a formal delight.
For Maury, life without joy, without transfiguring excitement, is not worth living. Throughout his life he has been a questing Aeneas. Delight has given direction to his search, and in the end he understands: “I knew now what it was I had always feared: that this elation, this delight by which I lived might go from me.”
Caroline Ferguson Gordon was a notable American novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, was the recipient of two prestigious literary awards, a 1932 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1934 O. Henry Award.
Background
Born and raised in Todd County, Kentucky at her family"s plantation home known as "Woodstock," Caroline Gordon received a high level of education at her father"s Clarksville Classical School for Boys in neighboring Montgomery County, Tennessee. Their daughter Nancy was born in September.
Education
By 1916 she had graduated from West Virginia"s Bethany College and obtained a job as a writer of society news for the Chattanooga Reporter newspaper.
Career
After eight years, she left Chattanooga and returned home, where, at the age of twenty-nine, she met Allen Tate, a free-spirited "bohemian" poet, commentator and essayist, four years her junior. They immediately embarked on a passionate love affair which culminated in a pregnancy and a May 15, 1925 wedding. Over the next twenty years, Caroline Gordon (who retained her maiden name) and Allen Tate lived in Tate"s house in Clarksville.
Their guests included some of the best-known writers of their time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O"Connor, T. South. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, and Ford Madox Ford, the author whom Gordon considered her mentor.
Ford counseled and prodded her into completing her first novel Penhally, published in 1931. The O. Henry was a unique second-place prize awarded for her 1934 short story "Old Red", published in Scribner"s Magazine.
There were seventeen third-place recipients that year, including William Saroyan, Pearl Buck, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. Between 1934 and 1972, Gordon published nine additional novels, five of which were written during the late 1930s and World World War World War II Gordon"s early fiction was influenced by her association with the Southern Agrarians.
Caroline Gordon"s marriage to Allen Tate ended in divorce in 1945, followed by a 1946 remarriage and an ultimate divorce in 1959.
They continued to correspond, however, and remained friends. Cheney, author of four novels based in south Georgia, considered Caroline to be his "literary mentor." She taught him to write literature as compared to journalism, his previous occupation being that of a crime reporter. She also introduced them to Flannery O"Connor, with whom they became close friends.
She continued to write until crippled by a March 1, 1981, stroke in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, where she lived in her later years.
She died six weeks later, following surgery, at the age of 85.
Paul V. Murphy writes that she "exhibited a southern nostalgia as strong as any member of the group, including Davidson, the most unreconstructed of the Agrarians".