Andrew Nelson Lytle was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1902 and had a long life and career as a writer, novelist, teacher, editor, and farmer. His education included the Sewanee Military Academy, Vanderbilt University (B.A. 1925), a year of study in France, and two years at the Yale School of Drama. He was the editor at the Sewanee Review and while there published the work of Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O’Connor, Peter Taylor, Katherine Anne Porter among others. Lytle contributed the essay “ The Hind Tit” to I’ll Take My Stand. He was awarded many honors for his work as a man of letters. He died in December 1995 in Monteagle, Tennessee.

John Crowe Ransom noted poet, critic, educator and editor was born April 30, 1888 in Pulaski, Tennessee. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1909, was a Rhodes Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, 1910-1913, and joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in 1914, where he taught English until 1937. While at Vanderbilt, Ransom was a major figure in both the Fugitive and Agrarian groups. He published in the Fugitive magazine and contributed the introduction “ A Statement of Priciples” and the initial essay “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” for I’ll Take My Stand. Ransom accepted a position at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio as professor of poetry and later founded and edited an important literary quarterly, The Kenyon Review (1939-1959) His works of poetry include Poems About God (1919), Chills and Fever (1924), and Selected Poems (1945, 1963, 1969). Among the many honors and awards he received were the Bollingen Award in 1951 and the National Book Award for poetry in 1963. He died in 1974 at the age of eighty six.

John Orley Allen Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky November 19, 1899. He graduated from Vanderbilt University, Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa in 1922. He was one of the Fugitive poets and published the essay “Remarks on the Southern Religion” in I’ll Take My Stand. In 1936 he was co-editor with Herbert Agar of Who Owns America, a later Agrarian treatise. Tate was an accomplished man of letters, publishing throughout his lifetime poetry, criticism, and a novel. He was also a teacher and editor. Allen Tate died in Nashville in February 1979.

Robert Penn Warren was born April 24, 1905 in Guthrie, Kentucky where he grew up. He graduated from Vanderbilt in 1925, and while there joined the Fugitive poets and published in the Fugitive magazine. He was a Rhodes Scholar at New College in Oxford from 1928-1930, and while at Oxford he wrote his essay “ The Briar Patch” for I’ll Take My Stand.” Warren was a poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and teacher and as one of the foremost men of letters in America he received many honors and awards for his work including three Pulitzer Prizes. In February of 1986 he was named the first official Poet Laureate of the United States. He died September 15, 1989.