Hillbilly Realist: Herman Clarence Nixon of Possum Trot

One man’s intellectual odyssey from Victorianism to Modernism Nixon’s life offers insight into one southerner’s efforts to comprehend and interpret the conflict and change of his time and illuminates for contemporary Americans a classical view of life–one lived fully, right in strength, beauty, courage, compassion, adventure, and thought.

Clarence Nixon was first and foremost a Southern intellectual, deeply involved in the region’s cultural renaissance, and his life reveals an intellectual odyssey from Victorianism to Modernism. As his personality, ideology, and social environment interacted, a new world view emerged. But he was an ambivalent modernist, like many intellectuals who were reared in the nineteenth-century South, he never abandoned certain Victorian ideals and values.