John Donald Wade – författare

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790-1870) was a lawyer, judge, state senator, newspaper editor, minister, political propagandist, and college president. He was also a writer who published one of Georgia’s first important literary works in 1835, Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, Etc. in the First Half Century of the Republic. John Donald Wade’s biography of Longstreet was first published in 1924 but was out of print during most of Wade’s lifetime. In this 1969 reissue, M. Thomas Inge provides a bibliography of Wade’s published work in addition to an introduction.As Inge notes, this biography was one of the first attempts to assess the cultural background of southern literature and it was the first real effort to investigate the nature of southwestern humor. In the opening chapter Wade announces his theme by saying that the history of Longstreet becomes “an epitome, in some sense, of American civilization.” The biography gradually narrows to a southern focus and as Inge remarks, Wade attempts “to take a panoramic view of the psyche of an entire society through one representative figure.”

One of the most important of the Southern magazines in the 1920s was The Fugitive, a magazine of verse and brief commentaries on literature in general. Among its contributors were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, and Merrill Moore. Publication began in April 1922 and ended in December 1925. Soon thereafter, the “Fugitive” writers and some others became profoundly concerned with the materialism of American life and its effect upon the South. The group became known as “Agrarians.” Their thinking and discussion culminated in a symposium, I’ll Take My Stand, published in 1930.In his first two lectures Davidson describes the underlying nature and aims of the Fugitive and Agrarian movements. He brings to the discussion his intimate and thorough knowledge of Southern life and letters. The third lecture deals with the place of the writer in the modern university, posing the questions of whether the writer needs the university and whether the university needs or wants the writer.