Stark Young
Stark Young was an American author and educator, born in Mississippi in 1881, who is primarily recognized for his novel *So Red the Rose*, which is noted as one of the early and popular Civil War novels. His academic journey began at the University of Mississippi, where he enrolled at the young age of fourteen, and later he earned a master's degree in English from Columbia University. Young's teaching career spanned several prestigious institutions, including the University of Mississippi and Amherst College, before he transitioned to editorial work at *The New Republic* and served as a drama critic for *The New York Times* for a brief period.
In addition to his novels, which reflect the complexities of Southern life and history, Young made significant contributions to drama through criticism, translations, and his own plays. His literary works often explore themes related to tradition and societal changes in the South, with his notable novels like *Heaven Trees* and *The Torches Flare* complementing the historical narrative established in *So Red the Rose*. Young was also involved in the Southern Agrarian movement, which is reflected in his essays, asserting his connection to Southern culture and tradition. Overall, Stark Young's multifaceted career underscores his impact on American literature and drama, particularly in the context of the Southern experience.
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Subject Terms
Stark Young
Drama Critic
- Born: October 11, 1881
- Birthplace: Como, Mississippi
- Died: January 6, 1963
- Place of death: New York, New York
American novelist and critic
Biography
Stark Young, known chiefly as the author of So Red the Rose and often ranked as a minor figure among the Southern Agrarians, was born in Mississippi in 1881. When a typhoid epidemic closed the preparatory school he was attending, he was allowed to enter the University of Mississippi at the age of fourteen. After graduating in 1901 he continued his studies at Columbia University, from which he received his master’s degree in English in 1902.
His first career was in the classroom. After a short period of teaching in a military school for boys he became an instructor in English at the University of Mississippi in 1904. Three years later he joined the faculty of the University of Texas, where he taught until 1915, when he became professor of English at Amherst College. In 1921 he resigned to become a member of the editorial staff of the New Republic, a position he held until 1947, except for one year (1924-1925) when he served as drama critic of The New York Times. Concurrently he was an associate editor of Theatre Arts Monthly from 1921 to 1940. His close association with the theater resulted in five books of drama criticism, the plays he wrote in both prose and verse, translations, and the direction of several productions, including that of Henri-René Lenormand’s The Failures and Eugene O’Neill’s Welded, on Broadway.
Young’s most sustained work was in the novel. So Red the Rose, one of the earliest and most popular of the Civil War novels, achieves scope and depth because the writer has dramatized against a factual historical background the symbolic conflict between opposing forces of tradition and disintegration implicit in southern life and character. This novel and Young’s earlier ones—Heaven Trees, a nostalgic re-creation of plantation life in antebellum days, and The Torches Flare and River House, which deal with later periods of the regional experience—make up, in effect, four panels of a dramatic and somberly realized social and moral history of the South. Young also declared his local loyalties in an essay in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, written for a symposium by “Twelve Southerners” and published in 1930.
Bibliography
Bentley, Eric. “Stark Young.” Theater 14, no. 1 (Winter, 1982).
Harder, Kelsie B. “Dialect Duplicity in Stark Young’s So Red the Rose.” Mississippi Folklore Register 16, no. 2 (Fall, 1982).
Miller, J. W. “Stark Young, Chekhov, and the Method of Indirect Action.” Georgia Review 18 (1964).
Pilkington, John. Stark Young. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Sommers, John J. “The Critic as Playwright: A Study of Stark Young’s The Saint.” Modern Drama 7 (February, 1965).
The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 24, no. 4 (Summer, 1986).
Young, Stark. Stark Young, a Life in the Arts: Letters, 1900-1962. Edited by John Pilkington. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.