Donald Grady Davidson and John Crowe Ransom

Ransom and Davidson were two of twelve Southerners who wrote the Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand in 1930. Ransom was the unofficial leader, and Davidson wrote more for the movement's journal, The American Review, than anyone else, twenty-one articles. The twelve were answering H. L. Mencken's attacks on Southern religion and conservatism and the spread of industrial modernity. Critics have long called the book a reactionary, romanticized defense of the Old South and the Lost Cause that ignored slavery. Fellow contributor Robert Penn Warren later supported the civil rights movement.

What the plaque says

Donald Grady Davidson (1893-1966) John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) Giles County natives Donald G. Davidson and John C. Ransom were influential personages in American literature. Professors at Vanderbilt University, they helped found The Fugitive (1922~25), a magazine which launched the "Southern literary renaissance." They contributed to the essential Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), essays critical of industry's dehumanizing effects on the South.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pulaski Public Square and the Giles County Courthouse — steps away
  The 1909 courthouse and nineteenth-century storefronts on Pulaski's square, in the town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded and where the architect Moses McKissack III was born.
• James D. Vaughan Southern Gospel Music Museum — 17 mi
  A museum on the third floor of the Vaughan Municipal Building on the Lawrenceburg square, honoring the shape-note publisher who built a songbook, quartet and radio empire here from 1903.
• David Crockett State Park — 19 mi
  A Lawrenceburg park on Shoal Creek where Davy Crockett ran a gristmill, a powder mill and a distillery from 1817, and later broke with Andrew Jackson over Indian removal.
• Meriwether Lewis Site — 32 mi
  The place on the Natchez Trace Parkway where Meriwether Lewis died in October 1809, with his 1848 monument, a pioneer cemetery, a walk on the Old Trace and a free campground.

More markers nearby

• Walter Herschel Beech — steps away
• Martin College — 0.5 mi
• Gabriel McKissack — 0.6 mi
• Bridgeforth High School — 0.8 mi