Caroline Gordon

Caroline Ferguson Gordon (October 6, 1895 – April 11, 1981) was a notable American novelist and literary critic who, while still in her thirties, was the recipient of two prestigious literary awards, a 1932 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1934 O. Henry Award.

Born and raised in Todd County, Kentucky at her family's plantation home known as "Woodstock," Caroline Gordon received a high level of education at her father's Clarksville Classical School for Boys in neighboring Montgomery County, Tennessee. By 1916 she had graduated from West Virginia's Bethany College and obtained a job as a writer of society news for the Chattanooga Reporter newspaper. After eight years, she left Chattanooga and returned home, where, at the age of twenty-nine, she met Allen Tate, a free-spirited "bohemian" poet, commentator and essayist, four years her junior. They immediately embarked on a passionate love affair which culminated in a pregnancy and a May 15, 1925 wedding. Their daughter Nancy was born in September.

Over the next twenty years, Caroline Gordon (who retained her maiden name) and Allen Tate lived in Tate's house in Clarksville. Their guests included some of the best-known writers of their time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, T. S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, and Ford Madox Ford, the author whom Gordon considered her mentor. Ford counseled and prodded her into completing her first novel Penhally, published in 1931. Gordon received both of her awards, the Guggenheim and the O. Henry, during this early period. The O. Henry was a unique second-place prize awarded for her 1934 short story "Old Red", published in Scribner's Magazine. There were seventeen third-place recipients that year, including William Saroyan, Pearl Buck, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe.

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