Caroline Gordon , novelist, short-story writer, and teacher of writers, is best known as a member of the Southern Renaissance, that literary phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s which centered about the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians in Nashville, Tennessee, and included such writers as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Caroline Gordon was born 6 October 1895 on a tobacco farm in Todd County, Kentucky, near Clarksville, Tennessee, where her father, James Morris Gordon, conducted a classics school for boys. When she was fourteen, Gordon was sent as a pupil to her father's school, where she was the only girl in attendance. This early immersion in Latin and, later at Bethany College (A.B., 1916), in Greek literature, was the beginning of a lifelong preoccupation with classical form and heroic virtue.

Through Robert Penn Warren, who lived on a neighboring farm in Todd County, Gordon met Allen Tate about...