Associated with the Fugitives and Southern Agrarians, poet Donald (Grady) Davidson was born in Tennessee and earned both a BA and an MA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Davidson published five collections of poetry The Outland Piper (1924), The Tall Men (1927), Lee in the Mountains and Other Poems (1938), The Long Street: Poems (1961), and Collected Poems: 1922–1961 (1966). In the 1920s, Davidson co-founded and co-edited the influential journal The Fugitive. His prose writings include an essay in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930); a collection, Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays (1957); and Southern Writers in the Modern World (1958), which he first delivered as a lecture at Mercer University in Georgia. Davidson wrote a two-volume history of Tennessee, The Tennessee Volume One: The Old River: Frontier to Secession (1946) and The Tennessee Volume Two: The New River: Civil War to TVA (1948). His novel,The Big Ballad Jamboree, was published posthumously by the University Press of Mississippi (1996). Davidson taught English at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1968. He spent summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.

Josephine Claxton chose the pseudonym Ellen Douglas when her first novel, A Family’s Affairs was to be published in 1962.  Apostles of Light (1973) was a National Book Award finalist, but it is Can’t Quit You Baby that is the essential novel of her career. Douglas’s nonfiction includes Truth: Four Stories I Am Old Enough to Tell and Witnessing. Following Douglas’s death, Margalit Fox wrote in the New York Times that Douglas’s work “explored the epochal divide between the Old South and the New, examining vast, difficult subjects — race relations, tensions between the sexes, the conflict between the needs of the individual and those of the community — through the small, clear prism of domestic life.”

A plantation owner who vowed to “write what is, even if it is unpleasant,” Julia Peterkin revolutionized American literature in the 1920s by writing seriously about the lives of black farmers. In five bold, lyrical books she pushed the bounds of realism to earn the startled praise of such intellectuals and literary artists as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. In 1929 Peterkin became the first Southern writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for her best-selling novel Scarlet Sister Mary.

Green Thursday, Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin chronicle the collapse of plantation agriculture in South Carolina, using the Gullah language in a literary way and portraying the points of view of black workers rather than their white owners. At the same time, Peterkin’s stories are often the thinly veiled autobiography of a southern white woman struggling to create something new out of the beauty and sorrow around her. Roll, Jordan, Roll, with text by Peterkin and photographs by her friend Doris Ulmann, is now one of the most hotly-collected documentary volumes of the twentieth century.

Peterkin paved the way both for the Southern Renaissance and for later African American writers.

Byron Herbert Reece authored four volumes of poetry and two collections of fiction. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952. A collection of his selected poems, Fable in the Blood, was published by University of Georgia Press in 2002. Reece was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2001. The Byron Herbert Reece Society, formed in 2002, has worked to create the Reece Farm and Heritage Center and with the Georgia Assembly to name Reece “Georgia’s Appalachian Poet/Novelist” and to designate Highway 129 from Blairsville to Neels Gap “The Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Highway.” The Byron Herbert Reece Society is an illustration of “reviving” a lost writer and bringing new readers to an author’s work.