Andrew Nelson Lytle, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company, 1st Ed.

Description

Andrew Lytle’s Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company is one of the most prominent biographies of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the point of view of 20th Century southerners.

Lytle belonged to the Southern Agrarian literary movement of authors largely from Vanderbilt University comprising writers such as Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Flannery O’Connor and Lytle himself. Among the goals of the Agrarians was to create self-consciously southern heroes and stories. Some of the writing does not age well as it embraces Jim Crow-era assumptions about race “moonlight and magnolia” romanticism.

As literature Lytle’s Forrest is wonderful, portraying a salt-of-the-earth hero who rejects the elitism of credentialed expertise and routinely out-performs West-Pointers – both his Yankee opponents and his own superiors – by using his own uniquely southern independence-of-mind and self-reliance.

This volume is just plain scarce in 1st edition with dust jacket! Pages toned as expected; very good condition with slight edgewear and lightly chipped dust jacket.

Lytle, Andrew Nelson. Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company. New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1931. 1st edition, 402p., frontispiece, illustrations, maps.