Alva Review-Courier -

In choosing to study creative writing at Vanderbilt University, Jesse Hill Ford was seeking to become an important part of a storied U.S. literary tradition.

For years, Vanderbilt’s English Department had been at the forefront of a movement to carve out a unique place for southern writers in the panorama of American literature.

In the early 1920s literary scholars at the university called themselves the “Fugitives.” A decade later, several of the Fugitives became part of another scholarly group from Vanderbilt known as the “Agrarians.”

These authors and teachers argued that the South was a uni...