Andrew Lytle (Andrew Nelson Lytle) Biography

American novelist and critic, born in Tennessee, educated at Vanderbilt University where he was associated with the Fugitive group, in particular Allen Tate (see Agrarians). He shared their vision of the need for the South to assert its cultural and spiritual independence and refuse collusion with the materialistic industrial world. He contributed to the magazine The Fugitive and to the movement's anthology, I'll Take My Stand (1936). Lytle farmed for a time in northern Alabama. Later he taught at the University of the South at Sewanee and edited The Sewanee Review. His first book was a study of the controversial Civil War general, Bedford Forrest (1931); The Long Night (1936) was the first of his novels dealing with the Southern past. Of these the most successful is The Velvet Horn (1956), set in rural Tennessee in the mid-nineteenth century; it is partly an account of a boy's initiation into manhood, and partly a study of an incestuous relationship. It reflects Lytle's Jungian knowledge of myth and his (Episcopalian) Christianity. His essays are collected in The Hero with the Private Parts (1966). A Wake for the Living (1975) is a family memoir.