The Fathers is the powerful novel by the poet and critic recognized as one of the great men of letters of our time, Alan Tate. Old Major Buchan of Pleasant Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia, lived by a gentlemen’s agreement to ignore what was base or rude, to live a life which was gentle and comfortable because it was formal. Into this life George Posey came dashing, as Henry Steele Commager observed, “to defy Major Buchan, marry Susan, betray Charles and Semmes, dazzle young Lacy, challenge and destroy the old order of things.” “Great novel of the broken South.”—George Steiner in The New Yorker “A psychological horror story...concerned with life rather than death, with significance rather than with futility.”—Henry Steele Commager “The story displays so much imagination and such a profound reflection upon life that it cannot be neglected by anyone interested in contemporary literature.”—Edwin Muir “A masterpiece of formal beauty...deserves to be recognized as one of the most outstanding novels of our time.”—Janet Adam-Smith in The New Statesmen “It is one of the most remarkable novels of our time...[It] is in fact the novel GONE WITH THE WIND ought to have been.”—Arthur Mizener