Fred Hobson, The Atlantic Monthly
Not only comprehensive and well researched . . . but also insightful


From Booklist
Some biographers depict the triumph of poetic genius as a thing fated and inevitable. Underwood discards all such illusions in this compelling account of Allen Tate's formative years. Indeed, painstaking research reveals how close this literary genius came to losing his way and squandering his gifts by becoming a political pamphleteer. To uncover the reasons for this near-tragedy, Underwood plumbs a difficult childhood during which Tate's parents burdened him with the myth of beleaguered southern virtue. In his self-lacerating responses to the imperatives of that myth, Tate vacillated. His true artistic vocation allied him with regional giants like Faulkner and Ransom and with international figures like Hemingway and Pound. But reactionary politics exercised a strong attraction, drawing Tate into the orbit of apologists for Hitler and Mussolini. Tracing each step--and misstep--in letters, conversations, and poems, Underwood charts the torturous path by which Tate finally escaped from fascist temptations and genealogical confusions. Liberated at last by self-knowledge, Tate could finally write the milestone novel The Fathers, in which he exposed--with artistic poise and maturity--the imprisoning cultural contradictions of the South. A biographical study to be treasured as long as Tate's masterful verse attracts readers. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Despite his celebrity and his fame, a series of literary feuds and the huge volume of sources have, until now, precluded a satisfying biography of Allen Tate. Anyone interested in the literature and history of the American South, or in modern letters, will be fascinated by his life. Poetry readers recognize Tate, whom T. S. Eliot once called the best poet writing in America, as the author of some of the twentieth century's most powerful modernist verse. Others know him as a founder of The Fugitive, the first significant poetry journal to emerge from the South. Tate joined William Faulkner and others in launching what came to be known as the Southern Literary Renaissance. In 1930, he became a leader of the Southern Agrarian movement, perhaps America's final potent critique of industrial capitalism. By 1938, Tate had departed politics and written The Fathers, a critically acclaimed novel about the dissolution of the antebellum South. He went on to earn almost every honor available to an American poet. His fatherly mentoring of younger poets, from Robert Penn Warren to Robert Lowell, and of southern novelists--including his first wife, Caroline Gordon--elicited as much rebellion as it did loyalty.

Long-awaited and based on the author's unprecedented access to Tate's personal papers and surviving relatives, Orphan of the South brings Tate to 1938. It explores his attempt, first through politics and then through art, to reconcile his fierce talent and ambition with the painful history of his family and of the South.

Tate was subjected to, and also perpetuated, fictional interpretations of his ancestry. He alternately abandoned and championed Southern culture. Viewing himself as an orphan from a region where family history is identity, he developed a curious blend of spiritual loneliness and ideological assuredness. His greatest challenge was transforming his troubled genealogy into a meaningful statement about himself and Southern culture as a whole. It was this problem that consumed Tate for the first half of his life, the years recorded here.

This portrait of a man who both made and endured American literary history depicts the South through the story of one of its treasured, ambivalent, and sometimes wayward sons. Readers will gain a fertile understanding of the Southern upbringing, education, and literary battles that produced the brilliant poet who was Allen Tate.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post Book World

So it is good to have this first-rate biography by Thomas A. Underwood....It takes Tate from his birth in late 1899 through the completion of The Fathers in 1938, a watershed moment in his long literary career.

Melissa McIntosh Brown - Memphis Commercial Appeal

Thomas A. Underwood's fine-tuned biography, Allen Tate: Orphan of the South, should please lovers of literature and Southern history alike.

Damon Smith - Boston Globe

In Thomas A. Underwood's new literary biography of Tate, who was instrumental in revitalizing Southern literature, we see the growth of a minor poet and major critic from his beginnings as a sickly boy struggling to connect with an overbearing mother and absentee father. In time, he grew to become a Modernist thinker paradoxically struggling against the wisdom of his age.

Library Journal

When Allen Tate (1899-1979) spoke of "my terrible family," apparently he meant not only his blood relatives but also Southern culture as a whole. As a youth, he coped with his violent father and distant mother by affecting aristocratic airs in the midst of familial squalor. He came into contact with writers like John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren at Vanderbilt and, during the obligatory sojourn to Europe between the wars, had run-ins with Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein. Tate was only able to come to terms with himself (and his burdensome heritage) in early middle age, by which time he had helped define the Southern Literary Renaissance, founded and abandoned the reactionary Agrarian movement, and published The Fathers, a novel one critic called "a psychological horror story." Best known today for such poems as "Ode to the Confederate Dead," Tate is fully dramatized here as a soul in torment, a seminal figure in Southern literature, and, as "a Modernist criticizing the modernization of America." An independent scholar, Underwood painstakingly researched all of Tate's life (the book includes nearly 100 pages of notes) but concludes in 1938, when Tate achieved some level of closure. Plans for a second volume are indefinite at this point, though it would be a pity not to build on this solid foundation.--David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

New York Times Book Review

It was once not unusual to find a practicing poet and man of letters -- like Allen Tate -- writing some of the best and most influential literary criticism available. Today academic theorists seem to be the sole proprietors of serious criticism. They are also, too frequently, the sole consumers. Thomas A. Underwood's generous, gentlemanly biography of Tate gives a portrait not only of a minor American poet, an avowed Southerner and a writer of penetrating, lucid criticism but also of an age when the split between ''them'' and ''us'' was not so painfully clear....Underwood has done valuable work.

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