Andrew Nelson Lytle

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Andrew Nelson Lytle

Born	December 26, 1902 Murfreesboro, Tennessee
Nationality	United States
Field	Literature
Institutions	University of Florida
Alma mater	Vanderbilt University

Andrew Nelson Lytle (December 26, 1902-December 12, 1995) was an American poet, novelist, dramatist, and professor of literature. He was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and early in his life planned to be an actor and playwright. He studied acting at Yale and performed on Broadway when he was in his 20s.

However, Lytle, unlike other Southerners intellectuals who left the South never to return, was brought home by the death of a kinsman, and he remained in the South, except for brief sojourns elsewhere, for the rest of his life.

Lytle's first real literary success came as a result of his association with the southern agrarian literary movement along with poets Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, who he knew from his time at Vanderbilt University. In fact, most historians of the Agrarian movement, a movement which created 1930's "I'll Take My Stand," consider Lytle to be one of the driving forces of the movement, and arguably the movement's most artful and consistent spokesman. In 1948, he helped start the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Florida.[1]

Like both Tate and Warren, his first published book-length work was a biography. "Bedford Forrest and his Critter Company" (1931), is considered the classic biography of American Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Lytle went on from there to write more than a dozen books -- including novels, collections of essays on literary and cultural topics, and collected short stories. Most critics consider 1957's "The Velvet Horn" to be his greatest work. It won the National Book Award for fiction. His 1973 memoir, "A Wake For The Living," is a tour-de-force in Southern storytelling, combining a deep religious sensibility, an expansive view of history that links events across decades and even centuries, and -- sometimes -- bawdy family tales.

Lytle served as editor of the Sewanee Review from 1961 to 1973 as a professor at the University of the South. It was during Lytle's tenure that the Review rose in prominence to one of the nation's most prestigious literary magazines. Lytle was an early champion of the work of Flannery O'Connor. Indeed, many writers -- including Tate and Warren, but also Elizabeth Bishop, Carolyn Tate, and Robert Lowell -- were encouraged and often had their writing improved by Lytle's insightful criticism.

Lytle also taught literature and creative writing at the University of Florida, where Harry Crews was a student.

Though Lytle retired from the University of the South in 1973, he never fully retired from either writing or teaching. In the last years of his life he had what he called the "great pleasure" of seeing most of his earlier books come back into print, and several university presses collected his stories and essays.

A warm and hospitable host, and an irrepressible raconteur, Lytle spent the last 20 years living in his cabin on the grounds of the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly in Monteagle, Tennessee, not far from the campus of the University of the South. A trip to the cabin became a kind of pilgrimage for many writers, teachers, and scholars. One famous tale concerned Lytle making a trip to Nashville and riding on an elevator with his pet rooster. He often recounted a favorite memory from his youth: one Sunday morning in church, as the collection plate was being passed, his father noticed a young Lytle dropping a quarter in. The father removed the quarter, handed it back, and remarked with a wink: "A penny makes just as much noise."

Lytle had two great literary loves in his life. One was Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" and the other was a more obscure book, Sigrid Undset's "Kristin Lavransdatter", which helped earn its author the Nobel Prize for literature, but is not much read by 21st century readers. Lytle's last book was also perhaps his shortest. "Kristin: A Reading" is an affectionate, insightful, and idiosyncratic take on Undset's work. It was published in 1992, just a few years before Lytle's death.

Lytle died in 1995, two weeks shy of his ninety-third birthday. At the time of his death he was still living in his cabin at Monteagle.