Caroline Gordon’s significance for the Catholic literary tradition has been so consistently underappreciated that even the sympathetic reader cannot help wondering whether her relative invisibility might be merited. When her importance is recalled at all, Gordon is reckoned as wife of (her handful of a husband) Allen Tate and as an indispensable editor of and mentor to many.
Her contributions in those latter roles were no small matter. Without her rallying praise and exacting advice, Walker Percy might never have gotten out from under his early novel
The Charterhouse, and
The Moviegoer might have remained an existentialist essay rather than a National Book Award recipient. When Robert Giroux wavered over Flannery O’Connor’s
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