The Underground Stream

This biography offers the most complete and accurate portrait to date of the writer Caroline Gordon (1895–1981). Viewing Gordon’s life in the context of female literary tradition, Nancylee Novell Jonza reclaims Gordon’s integrity, individuality, and artistic vision from beneath a self-effacing, sometimes detractive, public image carefully fostered by the artist herself. Gordon’s nine novels and three short-story collections are a major contribution in their own right to the southern literary renaissance. Despite an enduring readership, however, she still remains in the shadow of her husband, Allen Tate, the Fugitive Poet and Agrarian critic, partially due to her contrived persona of a traditional southern lady turned artist under the tutelage of a gifted, benevolent male writer. Drawing on manuscript drafts, unpublished works, letters, and a significant body of her journalistic writing, Jonza investigates fully the causes and effects of Gordon’s self-mythologizing and covers substantially more ground than the thirty years during which she was closest to Tate. A little-known Caroline Gordon emerges from The Underground Stream. Her readers are sure to reach a deeper understanding of such aspects of Gordon’s life and her art as her family’s strong matriarchal tradition, her difficulties with pregnancy and motherhood, her conversion to Catholicism, her alcoholism, and her role within a sometimes destructive relationship with Allen Tate.