|
Allen Tate was born in 1899 in Winchester, Kentucky. His father's
business interests, mostly lumber, land and stock, forced the Tates to
move often. This lifestyle took its toll on the family. His
parents' marriage failed when he was only ten years old. In 1916,
he pursued the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, he
proved, however, unable to keep up with the other musicians. He
left and enrolled in college at Vanderbilt University.
He began
attending meetings with other men from the English Department in 1922
and thus began the Fugitives--
a group of men concerned with the
social climate of change they were witnessing in the South during that
time. As editor of a poetry journal, Tate
worked for three years promoting the literary renascence of the South.
In 1924, he moved to New York City, but while visiting
Robert Penn
Warren in Kentucky, he met and began a relationship with Caroline
Gordon, whom he married in New York in May 1925.
Between 1925 and 1928 Tate wrote freelance articles and reviews for
such periodicals as the Nation and the New Republic, did
editorial work for the publisher of pulp romance magazines.
Tate's four years in New York culminated in the publication of both
his first collection of poems,
Mr. Pope and Other Poems, and a
biography,
Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier. Written for a
popular audience, the life of Stonewall Jackson was the first of three
projected biographies of Confederate heroes. It was followed by
Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall
(1929). But Tate's inability to
meet deadline for his biography of Robert E. Lee led him
eventually abandon the project altogether.
In 1928 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and went abroad--to
London, where he met
T.S. Eliot,
Gertrude Stein, and
Ernest
Hemingway.
The next thirty years
proved literary success and personal failures. His marriage ended in
1959. Quickly following his divorce, he married poet Isabella
Gardner. Eventually, he divorced her to marry Helen Heinz, his former student at
Minnesota, in 1966. In 1967 Tate became the father of twin sons, one of
whom died in an accident in 1968 after the family's move to Sewanee, Tennessee. A third son was born in 1969. Allen Tate died
in Nashville in 1979.
|
SLR Recommends
|
