“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on
which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” –
Caroline Gordon
Caroline
Ferguson Gordon was a notable American novelist and literary critic and friends
with nearly every famous writer of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s. A great writer herself, she was the
recipient of two prestigious literary awards, a 1932 Guggenheim Fellowship and
a 1934 O.Henry Award for her short story Old
Red. In 1963 she republished the
story as the lead work for a book called Old
Red and Other Stories, also an award winner.
A
“free spirit” (her term for herself), she and husband Alan Tate often hosted
major writers in their Kentucky home where “writing was the talk from dawn ‘til
dark.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,
William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot and Robert Penn Warren were
frequent visitors, but the most important one for her was Ford Madox Ford, who
she considered her mentor. It was Ford who
counseled and prodded her into completing her first novel Penhally, which was influential in gaining her the prestigious
Guggenheim.
She
went on to write 9 more novels and dozens more short stories. Themes for her novels and stories were often autobiographical
and drawn from the South, giving the rest of the world an in-depth look at the
region. The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon, published at the time of
her death in 1981, was lauded by Warren, who wrote the introduction. “Caroline
Gordon,” he said, “belongs to the group
of Southern women writers – Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne
Porter – who have been enriching our literature uniquely in this century.”
Despite
writing as a critic herself, Gordon thought of her own writing as a form of art. “And art,” she said, “should never be
judged. It should be the judge of us.”
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