The South, Andrew Lytle feared, had been poor and virtuous for too long and now found the temptations of industry and commerce too alluring to resist. Material prosperity weakened family, community, and tradition and deprived rural southern life of its vitality, rendering it both tumultuous and desolate. Born in Mufreesboro, Tennessee on the day after [...]
Automated and impersonal, American society, Andrew Lytle feared, was coming to be peopled by the rootless masses ensnared in dreary, routine, unimaginative, and irrelevant occupations—a society of interchangeable parts and interchangeable men. This condition was the very antithesis of the Christian economy. I. By the 1930s, Andrew Lytle thought the signs of impending disaster everywhere [...]
Andrew Nelson Lytle—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and professor of literature—extolled the order of the family, which by the 1930s he thought all but spent, precisely because it was rooted in the very concept of divine order that the modern world had decried and rejected. As patriarchy deteriorated, as acceptance of divine supremacy vanished, the family languished, [...]
History is the “remembered past,” remembered according to values and virtues that are the inheritance of a particular people. The story as told gives meaning to the “facts,” and the story must be told to be remembered. “Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will [...]
The Southern Critics: An Anthology Edited by Glenn C. Arbery, ISI Books A Southern critic by any other name would be an Agrarian or Fugitive. Four of the writers featured in this book defended their way of life against modernity 80 years ago at Vanderbilt University in “I’ll Take My Stand.” The others given voice here [...]