Customer Reviews

Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance

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The lack of attention Donald Davidson has received since his death is scandalous. No doubt it stems in part from his racicialist views and resistance to the civil rights movement. Well Davidson was a flawed man--but to call him a "Racist" ( His old friend Robert Penn Warren's daughter says that his name was never spoken in their house on that account--I find it hard to believe) is simply to miss the measure of the man. He was a fine poet (just a notch below Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom) and a brilliant literary critic and teacher. His "Attack on Leviathan" is essential reading for those who confuse conservatism with Newt Gingrich, and his poem "Lee in the Mountains" is a tribute not only to a lost cause, but to all lost causes, and should therefore resonate with all but the incurable narcissist. Winchell has done us a great service by presenting the man warts and allto us. If we ever get beyond the name calling that passes for political and literary judgement these days it will be due in large measure to books like this one.

This is a superb biography. Mark Royden Winchell's admiration for Davidson is clear, but it does not lead him to overestimate Davidson's achievements or gloss over his faults. The book, based on painstaking but lightly worn research, is just the right length, and the text, written in economical, elegant prose of which its subject would doubtless have approved, is complemented by sixteen pages of valuable photographs.

Winchell furthers our understanding of a fascinating part of America's recent literary and social history. But he also gives us a sensitive portrait of a man possessed of the kind of dignity that, like much that Davidson loved, has largely disappeared from most of our world -- but which, thanks in part to Donald Davidson, survives and prospers among the inheritors of the Southern Agrarian tradition.

Mark Royden Winchell, the leading scholar of the Southern Agrarians of his generation, studied under the last of the Agrarians at Vanderbilt, and was thus perfectly suited to prepare this outstanding bio. Sadly, Winchell died on May 8, 2008 at the young age of 59. This work will stand as a testament.