“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
Born in
Kentucky on Oct. 6, 1895 Gordon was a novelist, literary critic and friend of
nearly every famous writer of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s.
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, Robert Penn Warren and Ford Madox Ford, the writer she
considered her “mentor,” were frequent
visitors.
Winner of both a
1932 Guggenheim Fellowship following publication of her first novel Penhally,
and a 1934 O. Henry Award for her short story Old Red, later the lead
work for her bestselling Old Red and Other Stories, she authored 10
novels and dozens of short stories.
Most of her
works were set in the South and many of them autobiographical in nature, providing
the world with an in-depth look at the region and the times. The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon,
published at the time of her death in 1981, was lauded by Warren “for enriching
our literature uniquely in this century.”
Gordon said
she thought of her 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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