Andrew Lytle; Prominent Southern Agrarian Writer

Andrew Lytle, one of the South’s most prominent literary figures, has died at the mountaintop cabin where writers gathered to talk of their craft, swap stories and sip bourbon from silver cups. He was 92.

Lytle, the last surviving member of the influential Agrarian writing group, died Tuesday of systemic failure in Monteagle, University of the South spokesman Joe Romano said.

Lytle’s comrades included Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and other writers based at Vanderbilt University.

In 1930, Lytle contributed a celebration of life on an Old South farm to a collection of essays called “I’ll Take My Stand,” a book that sparked debate about the agrarian versus industrial way of life.

The Agrarians said technology was creating an industrial wasteland with centralized politics and standardized culture and called for a return to the tradition of self-sufficient farmers.

Born in Murfreesboro, Tenn., Lytle graduated from Vanderbilt and studied at Oxford University in England. He attended Yale’s school of drama and supported himself as an actor in New York for a while.

His first novel, “The Long Night,” appeared in 1936, and he published two more novels in the 1940s. But his most important and enduring novel was “The Velvet Horn,” which was published in 1957.

In a review of “The Velvet Horn” for The Times, Paul Jordan-Smith stated: “It is a book you reread at once for the beauty of its distinguished prose and memorable sentences.”

Lytle taught at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and the University of Florida. Among his students were many prominent writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Madison Jones, Harry Crews and Merrill Joan Gerber.