Werner Sollors

Thomas A. Underwood

Caldwell Titcomb

An innovative departure from traditional approaches to political thought, this groundbreaking anthology includes minority ideologies where they occurred historically. By interweaving minority voices with majority documents rather than grouping them together, Political Thought in the United States presents us with a uniquely organic portrait of American political life. Beginning with the time of the explorers and early settlers, Lyman Tower Sargent presents the political beliefs and ideologies of religious minorities, women, North American Indians, and African Americans as fundamental components of American thought. Political Thought in the United States centers on two themes: the relationship between majority rule and minority rights, and the focus of power in the American system. Together with classic documents long heralded as cornerstones of American democracy, the book features writings of those opposed to the Constitution, slave petitions, Indian treaties, Emerson's Politics, works of conservatives like John Taylor and Herbert Hoover, documents from the feminist movements, labor manifestos, critiques of industrialization, and W. E. B. Du Bois's still-debated The Talented Tenth, and much more.

A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe

Blacks at Harvard

Despite his celebrity and his fame, a series of literary feuds and the huge volume of sources have, until now, precluded a satisfying biography of Allen Tate. Anyone interested in the literature and history of the American South, or in modern letters, will be fascinated by his life. Poetry readers recognize Tate, whom T. S. Eliot once called the best poet writing in America, as the author of some of the twentieth century's most powerful modernist verse. Others know him as a founder of The Fugitive, the first significant poetry journal to emerge from the South. Tate joined William Faulkner and others in launching what came to be known as the Southern Literary Renaissance. In 1930, he became a leader of the Southern Agrarian movement, perhaps America's final potent critique of industrial capitalism. By 1938, Tate had departed politics and written The Fathers, a critically acclaimed novel about the dissolution of the antebellum South. He went on to earn almost every honor available to an American poet. His fatherly mentoring of younger poets, from Robert Penn Warren to Robert Lowell, and of southern novelists--including his first wife, Caroline Gordon--elicited as much rebellion as it did loyalty. Long-awaited and based on the author's unprecedented access to Tate's personal papers and surviving relatives, Orphan of the South brings Tate to 1938. It explores his attempt, first through politics and then through art, to reconcile his fierce talent and ambition with the painful history of his family and of the South. Tate was subjected to, and also perpetuated, fictional interpretations of his ancestry. He alternately abandoned and championed Southern culture. Viewing himself as an orphan from a region where family history is identity, he developed a curious blend of spiritual loneliness and ideological assuredness. His greatest challenge was transforming his troubled genealogy into a meaningful statement about himself and Southern culture as a whole. It was this problem that consumed Tate for the first half of his life, the years recorded here. This portrait of a man who both made and endured American literary history depicts the South through the story of one of its treasured, ambivalent, and sometimes wayward sons. Readers will gain a fertile understanding of the Southern upbringing, education, and literary battles that produced the brilliant poet who was Allen Tate.

Thomas A. Underwood

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