Caroline Ferguson Gordon (October 6, 1895—April 11, 1981) was a notable American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, was the recipient of two prestigious literary awards, a 1932 Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

 and a 1934 O. Henry Award

O. Henry Award

The O. Henry Award is the only yearly award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry....

.

Biography

Born and raised in Todd County, Kentucky

Todd County, Kentucky

Todd County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of 2000, the population is 11,971. Its county seat is Elkton. The county is named after Colonel John Todd, who was killed at the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782...

 at her family's plantation home known as "Woodstock," Caroline Gordon received a high level of education at her father's Clarksville

Clarksville, Tennessee

Clarksville is a city in and the county seat of Montgomery County, Tennessee, United States, and the fifth largest city in the state. The population was 132,929 in 2010 United States Census...

 Classical School for Boys in neighboring Montgomery County, Tennessee

Montgomery County, Tennessee

Montgomery County is a county located in the U.S. state of Tennessee. The county seat is Clarksville. The population was 172,331 at the 2010 census. It is one of the four counties included in the Clarksville, TN–KY Metropolitan Statistical Area....

. By 1916 she had graduated from West Virginia

West Virginia

West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...

's Bethany College

Bethany College (West Virginia)

Bethany College is a private liberal arts college located in Bethany, West Virginia, United States. Founded in 1840, Bethany is the oldest institution of Higher Education in West Virginia.-Location:...

 and obtained a job as a writer of society news for the Chattanooga Reporter newspaper. After eight years, she left Chattanooga and returned home, where, at the age of twenty-nine, she met Allen Tate

Allen Tate

John Orley Allen Tate was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944.-Life:...

, a free-spirited "bohemian

Bohemianism

Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...

" 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. Their daughter Nancy was born in September.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...

, Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

, William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...

, Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...

, T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

, Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...

, and Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

, the author whom Gordon considered her mentor. Ford counseled and prodded her into completing her first novel Penhally, published in 1931. Gordon received both of her awards, the Guggenheim

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

 and the O. Henry

O. Henry Award

The O. Henry Award is the only yearly award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry....

, during this early period. The O. Henry

O. Henry Award

The O. Henry Award is the only yearly award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry....

 was a unique second-place prize awarded for her 1934 short story "Old Red", published in Scribner's Magazine

Scribner's Magazine

Scribner's Magazine was an American periodical published by the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons from January 1887 to May 1939. Scribner's Magazine was the second magazine out of the "Scribner's" firm, after the publication of Scribner's Monthly...

. There were seventeen third-place recipients that year, including William Saroyan

William Saroyan

William Saroyan was an Armenian American dramatist and author. The setting of many of his stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in California in his native Fresno.-Early years:...

, Pearl Buck, Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South like the novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim, but they also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was...

, William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...

, John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...

, and Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing...

.

Between 1934 and 1972, Gordon published nine additional novels, five of which were written during the late 1930s and World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

.

Gordon's early fiction was influenced by her association with the Southern Agrarians

Southern Agrarians

The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the Southern United States, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a...

. Paul V. Murphy writes that she "exhibited a southern nostalgia as strong as any member of the group, including Davidson

Donald Davidson (poet)

Donald Grady Davidson was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author...

, the most unreconstructed of the 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. On November 24, 1947, during another difficult period in her marriage, Gordon converted to Catholicism

Catholicism

Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

.

She continued to write until crippled by a March 1, 1981, stroke in San Cristóbal de las Casas

San Cristóbal de las Casas

San Cristóbal de las Casas also known as it's native Tsotsil name, Jovel is a city and municipality located in the Central Highlands region of the Mexican state of Chiapas...

, Chiapas

Chiapas

Chiapas officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Chiapas is one of the 31 states that, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 118 municipalities and its capital city is Tuxtla Gutierrez. Other important cites in Chiapas include San Cristóbal de las...

, Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

, where she lived in her later years. She died six weeks later, following surgery, at the age of 85.

Selected works

• Penhally (1931)
• Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934)
• None Shall Look Back (1937)
• The Garden of Adonis (1937)
• Green Centuries (1941)
• The Women on the Porch (1944)
• The Forest of the South (1945)
• The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story (with Allen Tate) (1950)
• The Strange Children (1951)
• The Malefactors (1956)
• A Good Soldier: A Key to the Novels of Ford Madox Ford (1957)
• How to Read a Novel (1957)
• Old Red and Other Stories (1963)
• The Glory of Hera (1972)
• The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon (1981)