Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-285) and index.

Tale of three cities -- Editorial legacy -- Cleanth Brooks, the New Criticism, and the new pedagogy -- Post-Fugitive poetry -- Randall Jarrell: the precocious pupil -- John Berryman, the Southern review, and Five young American poets -- Robert Lowell: an underlying sense of form -- Fugitives and fiction -- Andrew Lytle: Fugitive art in Agrarian fiction -- Caroline Gordon: fiction in the family -- Katherine Anne Porter: a gift for friendship -- Eudora Welty: the "generosity" of strangers -- Peter Taylor and the Fugitives: surrogate fathers, foster son -- Flannery O'Connor: the last direct legatee.

"In The Fugitive Legacy, Charlotte H. Beck examines the extraordinary impact the Nashville Fugitives made as teachers, editors, and mentors of a younger generation in American letters. Previously, the critics, poets, and fiction writers who were proteges of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren have received considerable scholarly attention only as individuals or in relation to small, close-knit groups of literary artists within single genres. Now, for the first time, this far-ranging group of accomplished writers is united as part of a larger phenomenon, the Fugitive legacy, which has extended its influence far beyond the parameters of southern literature."

"By 1937, most of the fugitive group had left Vanderbilt and moved on to other locations where they continued, through teaching and editorships, to develop and encourage an ever-widening circle of writers. At least at the beginning of their careers, these young writers were shaped by the Fugitives' critical methods and aesthetic standards, and as they came into their own, these ideas became at least a point of departure for products of their maturity."--Jacket.