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.
 

Sarah Newman Shouse resides in Scottsboro, Alabama.
 

“Herman Clarence Nixon (1886–1967) was an outstanding professor of history and political science and a persistent southern liberal during the middle third of the 20th century. Shouse’s biography of Nixon thoroughly explores his contributions as an academician and a liberal advocate.
As an account of Nixon’s activities, this book is excellent. Shouse’s narrative of his youth, education, academic career, and liberal activism is lively. The information she presents concerning Nixon’s experiences in Paris during 1919, his involvement in the writing of I’ll Take My Stand, his leadership in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and his contributions to southern historiography certainly enrich our knowledge.”
—American Historical Review
 

“Nixon suffered for his actions. . . . It is a testimony to what C. Vann Woodward called ‘hillbilly realism’ that Nixon could nonetheless find solace in the simplest forms of community. Because his life was the cautionary tale that Shouse presents, there is value in pondering whether Nixon’s country ways were really obsolete—or part of the bedrock on which the momentous changes of recent years are still being built.”
—Journal of American History