Literature

One of the most esteemed American writers of short stories in the twentieth century, Peter Taylor was born January 8, 1917, in Trenton to a notable political family. His maternal grandfather Robert Love "Bob" Taylor, a Democrat, served three terms…

Oliver Perry Temple, author, East Tennessee economic promoter, and trustee of the University of Tennessee, was born on January 27, 1820, near Greeneville. An 1844 graduate of Washington College in Washington County, Temple studied law and gained admittance to the…

The Tennessee State Library and Archives (TSLA) collects and preserves books and records of historical, documentary, and reference value and encourages and promotes library development throughout the state. It is the state agency responsible for preserving materials which document Tennessee's…

The Fugitives were a group of influential early twentieth-century poets and writers. In 1914 John Crowe Ransom and Walter Clyde Curry, both of whom taught English at Vanderbilt University, began meeting informally with a group of their undergraduates to discuss…

The Sewanee Review, founded by William Peterfield Trent in 1892 at the University of the South in Sewanee, is the nation's oldest continuously published quarterly. It changed from a general journal devoted to the humanities to a literary and critical…

Born on February 8, 1885, in Knox County, Tennessee, Laura Thornborough was a local-colorist writer who, through her writings and photographs, promoted a romantic and anti-modernist depiction of the Smoky Mountains and their inhabitants. Dramatic scenery, opportunities for hiking and…

Poet Richard Tillinghast was born in Memphis to Raymond Charles Tillinghast, a mechanical engineer from Massachusetts, and Martha Williford, daughter of a West Tennessee farmer and lawyer turned politician. This dual background of New England and agrarian South has given…

Acclaimed modern American writer Robert Penn Warren was at home in all the major genres--poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism--though poetry was his dominant mode. Warren was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes, a number unmatched by any other writer: one for his…

Tennessee's first state historian, Dr. Robert H. White was born in Crockett County in 1883. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1910 and completed his graduate work at George Peabody College and the University of Chicago. From 1911 until 1919…

Jurist and historian Samuel Cole Williams was born in Gibson County in 1864 and educated in the schools of Humboldt. Encouraged by Judge Horace Lurton--a family friend and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice--he enrolled in the Vanderbilt University law…

Frances Fitzpatrick Wright, author of books for children and adolescents, was born Fannie Bell Fitzpatrick near Gallatin. She spent her childhood in Arizona, but when she was orphaned at fifteen, Fannie Bell returned to the home of her Fitzpatrick grandparents…

Henderson Yoakum was a Jacksonian stalwart in Middle Tennessee during the tumultuous political battles of the 1830s and 1840s. This native Tennessean later became an important personal and political confidant of Texas Governor Sam Houston and wrote the first comprehensive…