renders what is merely argued in ‘Old Scratch,” (53). He reasons that “Jericho, Jericho, Jericho” represents Lytle’s transition from Southern Agrarianism to Southern fiction. Lytle’s first novel, The Long Night, was released later that year. While its setting, dialogue and story were distinctly Southern in style, Lytle successfully portrayed the South with a sole literary intent. Lytle continued to develop his literary career in the next few years, earning a Guggenheim fellowship in 1940 and publishing his second novel, At The Moon’s Inn, in late 1941. In an effort to support his family, including his first daughter, Pamela, Lytle accepted an invitation to teach at the Sewanee Military Academy later that year. In early 1942, Alexander Guerry, the vice-chancellor at the University of the South (at Sewanee the vice-chancellor holds the authority of chancellor while the titular chancellor is the regional bishop of the Episcopalian Church) hired Lytle to teach history at the University level. In their conversations Guerry complained frequently to Lytle about then editor, W.S. Knickerbocker, hoping the SR could become as successful as the other university quarterlies of its day. Before the early 1940’s there would have been neither sense nor purpose in the SR assigning itself purely to literature—several quarterlies were already devoted to the subject, including The Dial, Hound & Horn, The Symposium, and, most notably, the Southern Review, edited by the Fugitive-Agrarians Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren at LSU from 1935-42. Despite their successes, all of these magazines eventually folded under serious financial strain, and wartime budget cuts. George Core notes that the Southern Review was “declared superfluous by the narrow-minded and autocratic general then running Louisiana State University” (Core Editorial History 72) being the last of these quarterlies to shut down in 1942. The implications of the collapse of the Southern Review were intimately discussed in correspondence between Lytle and Allen Tate. The pair would soon collaborate to manage the SR to unparalleled success at a
was able to combine friendly donations along with a government grant secured by Guerry in an effort to pay contributors at a competitive rate. Tate also held the editorship for only eight issues, but in his brief tenure he more than tripled the circulation of the SR and further cemented its critical program, even featuring contributions from W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. Leatherman published another story in the SR in 1946, and, in another letter in the Sewanee Archives, actually requested that his third story be printed in the SR as the connective middle “Jim Daigre” story, “two of which Mr. Lytle published in the SR…I hope you will publish it” (8/22/1945). Tate obliged his request. As Core argues, the SR would have neither survived nor been worth remembering without the substantial contributions from Tate and Lytle. He notes that “Lytle and Tate had not only saved the Sewanee Review but completely remade it….the new Sewanee Review became an incomparably greater force in the world at large and in the Republic of Letters by at once making and interpreting literary history” (Editorial History 9-10). From 1946, when Tate resigned, to 1961 the editorship changed hands only once, from John Palmer to Monroe Spears. Palmer might well have held the position longer had he not been recalled to service by the U.S. Navy. Spears took over most effectively, assuring readers, as Palmer had, that he would continue to maintain the high standards created by Tate in his few years. Giving credibility to his words, Spears named both Lytle and Tate to the position of advisory editors at the SR, a role that Lytle would use effectively during Spears’s editorship. He was even able to secure Leatherman a SR fellowship (a by-product of the magazine’s increased popularity and endowment) that allowed him to work on a novel that Lytle would eventually edit. “I had a letter from Mr. Spears about the Fellowship. I am very grateful to you” (Lytle Papers 4/11/1957) Leatherman wrote to Lytle years afterward. In the meantime, Lytle published his third novel, A Name for Evil, in 1947.