to novelists Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor. Gordon also became a close friend of author Brainard Cheney and his wife, Frances (Fanny) Neel Cheney. Brainard Cheney considered Gordon to be his "literary mentor." According to Cheney, she taught him to write literature as compared to his previous occupation as a crime reporter. On November 24, 1947, Gordon converted to Catholicism. Influenced by Gordon, the Cheneys also converted to Catholicism. Gordon introduced the couple to Flannery O'Connor, with whom they became close friends. Gordon divorced Tate in 1959 on grounds of desertion. Tate remarried four days later, but he and Gordon remained correspondents and friends until Tate's death in 1979. In her later years, Gordon moved to San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. On March 1, 1981, she suffered a stroke. Gordon died six weeks later, following surgery, at age 85. Selected works Penhally (1931) Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934) None Shall Look Back (1937) The Garden of Adonis (1937) Green Centuries (1941) The Women on the Porch (1944) The Forest of the South (1945) The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story (with Allen Tate) (1950) The Strange Children (1951) The Malefactors (1956) A Good Soldier: A Key to the Novels of Ford Madox Ford (1957) How to Read a Novel (1957) Old Red and Other Stories (1963) The Glory of Hera (1972) The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon (1981) References 1895 births 1981 deaths 20th-century American novelists American women novelists People from Clarksville, Tennessee People from Todd County, Kentucky Novelists from Kentucky Novelists from Tennessee Writers of American Southern literature Converts to Roman Catholicism Bethany College (West Virginia) alumni 20th-century American women writers Kentucky women writers Southern Agrarians