Background
Walter Sullivan was born in Nashville. His father died three months after he was born, and Walter, an only child, spent his childhood living with his mother and various aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
( In his enduring fiction and criticism, Walter Sullivan ...)
In his enduring fiction and criticism, Walter Sullivan has invited readers to share the thoughts of a penetrating, contemporary intellect. Now he turns his pen on his own life to forge a stirring memoir that fondly recounts the life of the mind. From childhood in 1920s Nashville, where his father died three months after he was born, to the halls of Vanderbilt University, where he taught creative writing for more than fifty years, Sullivan recalls key episodes in his life—often pausing to ponder why some memories of seemingly trivial events persist while others, seemingly more important, have faded from view. As witness to a series of social and cultural moments, Sullivan passes on his sharp observations about depression and war, southern renascence and civil rights. He also includes lively anecdotes and sharp character sketches, with personalities ranging from his grandmother “Chigger” and Sally Fudge—who had lived through the Civil War and was said to attend the funerals of people she didn’t know—to Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt, with whose eccentricities he sometimes had to contend. Readers will discover a treasure trove of insights, as Sullivan’s views of academic life are complemented by remembrances of important writers: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey, Flannery O’Connor, and a host of others, blending the formal and familiar in a style befitting a lingering southernness. He also recalls his shock at being branded a racist by Kingsley Amis and addresses issues of race in academia and southern culture. Throughout his career, he sees himself as a guardian of lost causes, continuing to teach an appreciation of literature in the face of encroaching post-structuralism and political correctness. Laced with humor while maintaining a profound seriousness about what really matters in life, Nothing Gold Can Stay is a lively narrative of a life well lived that will charm any reader interested in American society during and after the Great Depression. Graced with emotional coherence achieved by an almost ironic tone that is sustained from first sentence to last, it is a book in which a distinguished writer considers his world—and his own mortality—and leaves us richer for it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826216315/?tag=2022091-20
(Selections from the Civil War diaries and memoirs of twen...)
Selections from the Civil War diaries and memoirs of twenty-three Southern women form an account of the war as it was lived and endured on the domestic front in the South.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1566635136/?tag=2022091-20
Walter Sullivan was born in Nashville. His father died three months after he was born, and Walter, an only child, spent his childhood living with his mother and various aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
He resumed his studies at Vanderbilt and graduated in 1947. He married Jane Harrison and they moved to Iowa City, where he earned an Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa, studying under Andrew Nelson Lytle.
He published a number of works and was an English professor at Vanderbilt University for more than fifty years. He wrote chiefly about the literature, the society, and the values of the south. After attending local schools, he began his studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 1941, studying creative writing under Donald Davidson.
He served in the Marines during World World War II but the war ended before he was assigned to combat.
He then returned to Vanderbilt and taught in the English department there from 1949 until his retirement in 2001. He deplored the change in English studies from the close study of the great texts to the dominance of various forms of theory, and was one of the founders of the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1987.
"We believed that language could accurately communicate an author"s intentions and that truth or an aspect thereof was available to those who were sufficiently gifted to find lieutenant But.. our beliefs and our writings, our very selves, were anathema to a large part of the literary world." He gave up lecturing on British and American fiction and spent the later decades of his career teaching only fiction writing.
An Episcopalian, he became disenchanted with the direction the Church was taking, and helped form the Society for the Preservation of the Book of Common Prayer in the 1960s.
(A novel about a failed novelist and his academic wife--a ...)
(Selections from the Civil War diaries and memoirs of twen...)
( In his enduring fiction and criticism, Walter Sullivan ...)
(Selections from the best writings of southern women who e...)
(Book by Sullivan, Walter)
(First Edition)
(Cloth. Near Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. First edit...)
He was a founding charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.