Marion Montgomery (poet)

Marion Montgomery (born 1925) is an American poet, novelist, educator, and critic. He lives and continues to write in Crawford, Georgia. For more than 30 years he was a professor of English at the University of Georgia.^[1]

Though Montgomery has published extensively as a poet and novelist, it is likely that he will be remembered as a literary and social critic. Born the same year as Flannery O'Connor, Montgomery was her friend and has become perhaps her most insightful interpreter. Montgomery often points out that he, like O'Connor, is a "Hillbilly Thomist," and it is that catholic worldview that permeates his own work and allows him particular insights into both O'Connor and another great subject of his work, Walker Percy.

Montgomery is perhaps the leading figure in what some have called the "second generation" of Fugitive/Agrarian writers. Writers who, like O'Connor herself, were too young to be the contemporary of Lytle, Tate, Ransom, and Warren, but who shared many of their literary and intellectual sensibilities.

Montgomery was born Marion Hoyt Montgomery in Thomaston, Georgia. After service in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, he married Dorothy Carlisle in 1951. They have five children. He received his A.B. (1950) and M.A. (1953) at the University of Georgia and did postgraduate work in creative writing at the University of Iowa (1956-58).

Montgomery has published three novels, all of which focus on conflicts between the Old and the New South. When Montgomery published his first novel, "The Wandering of Desire" (1962), Flannery O'Connor wrote him a letter that has become famous. She wrote, "The Southern writer can outwrite anybody in the country because he has the Bible and a little history. You have more than your share of both and a spendid gift besides."

His second novel, Darrell, was published in 1964, and -- in the words of Mongtomery's literary executor and former student Dr. Michael Jordan -- "combines comedy, satire, and tragedy in its depiction of the misadventures of a country-born boy and his grandmother as they attempt to adjust to life in an Athens neighborhood. Darrell's longing for an even more exciting life in Atlanta is counterbalanced by his grandmother's common sense and longing for the country."

Montgomery's most ambitious novel is 1974's Fugitive. It is an overt dramatization of the ideas that were at the center of the Fugitive/Agrarian movement. Successful country music songwriter Walt Mason, disillusioned with life in Nashville, moves to rural Georgia to become a gentleman farmer, only to find out that such a life can't be "poured in from the top," but must spring up from the roots.

Several of Montgomery's dozen or so published short stories have been included in "best of" anthologies. "I Got a Gal" and "The Decline and Fall of Officer Fergerson" appeared in Southern Writing in the Sixties (1966) and The Best American Short Stories: 1971, respectively.

Montgomery's books of poetry include Dry Lightning (1960), Stones from the Rubble (1965), and The Gull and Other Georgia Scenes (1969).

References

1. ^ Walsh, William. "An Interview with Marion Montgomery". Istanbul Literary Review. http://www.ilrmagazine.net/article/issue14_ar7.php. Retrieved 30 December 2010. 

Persondata
Name	Montgomery, Marion
Alternative names	Opa (to his family)
Short description	an amazing writer, father, and grandfather
Date of birth	1925
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death