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Allen Tate was born in 1899 in Winchester, Kentucky.  His father’s business interests, mostly lumber, land and stock, forced the Tates to move often. This lifestyle took its toll on the family.  His parents’ marriage failed when he was only ten years old.  In 1916, he pursued the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, he proved, however, unable to keep up with the other musicians.  He left and enrolled in college at Vanderbilt University.

He began attending meetings with other men from the English Department in 1922 and thus began the Fugitives– a group of men concerned with the  social climate of change they were witnessing in the South during that time. As editor of a poetry journal, Tate worked for three years promoting the literary renascence of the South.

In 1924, he moved to New York City, but while visiting Robert Penn Warren in Kentucky, he met and began a relationship with Caroline Gordon, whom he married in New York in May 1925.

Between 1925 and 1928 Tate wrote freelance articles and reviews for such periodicals as the Nation and the New Republic, did editorial work for the publisher of pulp romance magazines.

Tate’s four years in New York culminated in the publication of both his first collection of poems, Mr. Pope and Other Poems, and a biography, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier. Written for a popular audience, the life of Stonewall Jackson was the first of three projected biographies of Confederate heroes. It was followed by Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (1929). But Tate’s inability to meet   deadline for his biography of Robert E. Lee led him eventually abandon the project altogether.

In 1928 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and went abroad–to London, where he met T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.

The next thirty years proved literary success and personal failures. His marriage ended in 1959. Quickly following his divorce, he married poet Isabella Gardner.  Eventually, he divorced her to marry Helen Heinz, his former student at Minnesota, in 1966. In 1967 Tate became the father of twin sons, one of whom died in an accident in 1968 after the family’s move to Sewanee, Tennessee. A third son was born in 1969.  Allen Tate died in Nashville in 1979.