When Andrew Lytle arrived for one his last visits to the Vanderbilt University campus, he found the doors, quite literally, locked against him. It was the early ’80s, and Lytle was supposed to be teaching a Saturday session at a writers’ conference in Calhoun Hall. As the students gathered around him, Lytle tried the door and tried it again. Finally, he sighed in exasperation, “This is what we’ve come to, being locked out by our own school.”

Lytle then set about teaching his class outside, under the trees. After that day, Lytle vowed never to set foot on Vanderbilt soil again and—with the exception of a memorial service for Robert Penn Warren eight years later—he never did.

It has become the stuff of legend that Vanderbilt shunned its most famous alumni, the Fugitive Poets and the Agrarians who achieved nationwide attention in the 1920s and ’30s, alumni who included the poets John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren and the novelist Andrew Nelson Lytle. The legend has more than a little basis in fact. Lately, Vanderbilt bashing has become a popular pastime, both in the mayor’s office and in the press. Critics grumble about the university’s lack of community spirit and about its other failings, but, for many, the university’s lack of community awareness is hardly news. As early as the 1920s, Vanderbilt failed to realize that it had a coterie of geniuses-in-residence in its English Department. To some of its more perceptive critics, a straight line of continuity connects Vanderbilt’s rejection of the Fugitives to its less-than-enthusiastic treatment of its current athletic program.

Three years ago, when the university decided not to retain basketball coach Eddie Fogler, ostensibly for salary reasons, some longtime Vandy watchers remembered 1937, the year when Ransom, one of the nation’s most prominent poets and critics, asked for a $1,000 salary increase and was turned down. In short order, Ransom left Vanderbilt and went to Kenyon, where he founded the Kenyon Review. When the Fogler fiasco erupted in 1992, one alumnus suggested that the school adopt a new logo: Ransom, Nobel Laureate Earl Sutherland (who left Vandy to go to Stanford) and Fogler, holding a basketball between them. Above the three figures a motto would be emblazoned: “Vanderbilt University: Mediocritum est Veritas.”

Andrew Lytle died last week at 92, having never resolved his love-hate relationship with Vanderbilt. Most of the Fugitives never made their peace with the university, but in Lytle’s case, the simmering feud was particularly poignant. Once the disillusionment with Vanderbilt had set in, he moved to Monteagle Mountain, associated himself with the University of the South, and helped make The Sewanee Review, arguably, the best literary magazine in America. It’s not for nothing that Sewanee got the bulk of Tennessee Williams’ estate when the playwright died, even though Williams had nothing to do with Sewanee. The reputation of the school as a center for literary excellence—a reputation enhanced by Lytle and Tate (who also lived there much of his life)—had more than a little to do with it.

Vanderbilt can be forgiven for not realizing what it had in the Fugitives. Most of them were homegrown kids, hailing from within 100 miles of the campus. Lytle was from Murfreesboro, Warren was from Guthrie, Ky., and Ransom was from Pulaski. They were avowedly Southern in temperament and modernist in their literary leanings. They came along in the ’20s, when the Jazz Age was at its height, when the promise of material blessings seemed unlimited. Vanderbilt, in the words of its chancellor, wasn’t interested in producing poets; it wanted to produce bankers.

Vanderbilt, even then, had dreams of escaping the stigma of being a “Southern” university. It has continued to nurture those dreams ever since.

Vanderbilt was founded with the money of a northern shipping magnate. The last thing the school’s administrators wanted was for their institution to be perceived as some backwater Southern college. Thus, when the Fugitives showed up, rejecting much of the progressive dogma of their era, the stage was set for the university to treat them with disregard—and worse.

Admittedly, some of the Fugitives could be their own worst enemies: Allen Tate, though brilliant, had the sort of arrogant personality that almost got him expelled. Ridley Wills and Stanley Johnson both wrote novels mocking the university, and Donald Davidson, who stayed at Vanderbilt until his death in 1968, embarrassed school officials in his later years by championing segregation and joining the White Citizens’ Council. Imagine the shock of university officials when these same impudent upstarts went on to achieve worldwide fame.

But the Fugitives, impudent though they were, were also creating something new—modern literature and, in particular, modern poetry. Along with T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound, they invented it. Along with William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, they helped start the Southern literary renaissance that lasted until the end of World War II. It can be argued that only once before in American history—when the Transcendentalists (Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau) lived side by side in Concord, Mass., in the 1840s—had so great a group of writers come together in one place.

Lytle wasn’t really a member of the Fugitive group. The Fugitive magazine was published for three years, and a bad Lytle poem appeared in the very last issue. But he was a member of the group that immediately followed it, the Agrarians. Only four writers—Ransom, Tate, Warren and Davidson—were truly active in both groups. The Agrarian movement was formed in the wake of the Dayton Monkey Trial. Their purpose was to defend Southern society against the scorn and ridicule of outsiders such as H.L. Mencken. Their most famous tract was their 1930 book, I’ll Take My Stand, which warned against the dangers of industrial development. Over the years, I’ll Take My Stand has been savaged as being racist, fascist and neo-Confederate. Still, it has never been out of print. Even now, as the construction of I-840 rolls on with its attendant urban sprawl and as the odor of exhaust from millions of automobiles spoils the air, it is hard not to think that the Agrarians were on to something.

Most of the Agrarians, of course, were hardly agrarian at all. Having escaped their rural childhoods, they would not have been caught dead behind a plow. Most of them spent their adult lives in the academy or in the city.

Lytle, however, was different. When he talked about preserving the dignity of rural life, he meant what he said. He lived in a log cabin in the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly, grew his own crops, and despised most of the nuisances of the modern age, including the computer, the telephone and the television.

But Lytle was, first and foremost, a great storyteller, the best to be produced by either the Fugitives or the Agrarians. It was Robert Penn Warren who earned the big money and won the literary prizes, primarily because he moved to the Northeast and consented to play the literary establishment’s game. Lytle did neither. Warren wrote one great novel: All the King’s Men. Lytle wrote two—The Long Night (perhaps the best Civil War novel ever) and The Velvet Horn. But Lytle’s literary career was dogged by bad luck. The year The Long Night appeared, it was eclipsed by another novel about the Civil War, the work of an Atlanta woman—Margaret Mitchell. His second novel, At the Moon’s Inn, appeared days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thousands of copies had been purchased and distributed to the libraries of battleships and destroyers, where they were never seen again. Finally, in 1956, when The Velvet Horn was published, and when it appeared Lytle would finally win the Pulitzer Prize, another writer with Sewanee connections suddenly died in the backseat of a taxi in New York. As a result, James Agee’s posthumous A Death in the Family won the Pulitzer instead. Nevertheless, Lytle never complained. He knew how good he was.

As the aging Lytle took refuge on the mountaintop, more and more students and would-be writers went to pay him court—and he always served them whiskey in silver cups. At the same time, New Age critics began to attack him, and his fellow Agrarians, for their conservative political and cultural positions. Former Tennessean book editor Robert Wyatt, a Lytle student, once snorted that “Andrew hasn’t had a new idea in 100 years.”

Lytle never apologized for his conservatism. He was an unreconstructed Southerner whose first book was a biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest. According to Lytle’s account, Forrest is a national hero, the Southern equivalent of Roland and El Cid. Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company is still in print. Lytle’s foreword to the second edition in 1960—a musing on the rise of the mythical hero, his place in society and the fate that ultimately befalls any heroic cause—may be the best thing he ever wrote.

The Agrarians were an unusual bunch. Most of them believed what they wrote in I’ll Take My Stand, but only two, Davidson and Lytle, held on to those beliefs to their dying day. For Lytle, profoundly Christian, the matter was clear—no society could endure without a sense of mystery, the kind of mystery found in the changing of the seasons or in the magic of raising crops. God ordered nature. God also ordered art. Thus, the society most conducive to art was the society in which man worked in harmony with nature rather than trying to conquer it. It’s no wonder that I’ll Take My Stand became a cult classic in the 1960s or that environmentalists saw in it an early warning against man’s mistreatment of the planet. Lytle never disputed any of those interpretations, but, for him, the Agrarian movement was a religious movement too.

Of all the relationships among the Agrarians, the one between Lytle and Tate is the most fascinating. Allen Tate was a small man with a brilliant intellect and an insatiable sexual appetite. He was urbane and sophisticated and helped define the boundaries of modern poetry and criticism. He could also be merciless to his enemies and even more merciless to his friends. Lytle, despite his apparent solid rural underpinnings, was attracted by Tate’s audacity.

When Tate moved to New York, Lytle followed him and worked as an actor while researching his biography of Forrest. The letters between the two, written over a 40-year period, are not so much the letters of two friends, or even brothers (which is how they addressed each other). In the words of a woman who knew them both—Floy Beaty, wife of Vanderbilt professor Richmond Beaty—their closeness was more akin to that of a husband and wife. Lytle loved Tate’s sheer volubility; Tate loved Lytle’s stability. As Lytle later said, “He was always getting in trouble and asking me to get him out of it. There came a time when I couldn’t anymore.”

The dissolution of the friendship came in the 1960s when Tate, already aging, married his fourth wife. Since the two families were neighbors in Monteagle, Lytle one night invited the Tates to dinner. During the dinner party, one of Tate’s twin infant sons, who had been left in the care of a baby-sitter, choked to death. Tate’s wife associated the incident with Lytle. The friendship was destroyed.

Both men seemed to realize what the rupture meant; it had the finality of a divorce. Before he died in 1979 in Nashville, Tate sent a series of students and friends up to the mountain, begging Lytle to speak to him once again, but to no avail. In an ending eerily ironic and apt, however, Lytle did attend Tate’s funeral service. Now both men lie in the same burial ground at Sewanee.

Vanderbilt’s relationship with its most famous graduates remains, at best, tenuous. On the day Tate died, the university’s carillon chimed in his honor. When Warren died, the university—after considerable pressure—held a memorial service.

The university’s Jean and Alexander Heard Library houses the Fugitive/Agrarian Special Collection, but the collection was founded and funded by Jesse Wills, himself a member of the Fugitive group. The university has also created the Warren Center for Cultural Studies. However, there is no Ransom Hall, no Tate Poetry Conference, no Lytle literary award. The Vanderbilt English Department seems to have gone out of its way to hire professors and specialists in Southern Literature who denigrate the accomplishments of the Fugitives and Agrarians. Those few faculty members who count themselves as heirs to Warren, Tate and Lytle are an endangered species.

Many of the Agrarians’ works remain out of print. When publisher J.S. Sanders began reprinting them several years ago, he found that the Vanderbilt bookstore was reluctant to carry them. What would Lytle say in response to such a thing? More than likely, he’d quote the New Testament: “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own home.”