Episode 53: Marion Montgomery - Interview with Michael M. Jordan

Five Books for Catholics

The books recommended in this episode are:

1. On Matters Southern: Essays About Literature and Culture, 1964-2000 by Marion Montgomery
2. Possum, and Other Receipts for the Recovery of "Southern" Being by Marion Mongomery
3. Liberal Arts and Community: The Feeding of the Larger Body by Marion Mongomery
4. Romantic Confusions of the Good: Beauty as Truth, Truth as Beauty by Marion Mongomery
5. With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: in Company with Flannery O'Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Others by Marion Mongomery

Five Books for Catholics may receive a commission from qualifying purchases made using the affiliate links to the books listed.

Marion Montgomery (1925-2011) was a novelist and poet but is remembered for his literary and cultural criticism. An Anglo-Catholic, he shared the same background and outlook as his Catholic friend, peer, and fellow Georgian, the writer Flannery O’Connor, so much so, that he too described himself as a “hillbilly Thomist.” His cultural criticism draws on Thomism and Southern Agrarianism and stresses the importance of metaphysical realism, localism, and tradition. His literary criticism includes perceptive studies on writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy.

In this interview, Prof. Michael M. Jordan discusses Montgomery’s work and some of his best books.

Michael M. Jordan is Professor Emeritus of English at Hillsdale College and earned his PhD in English under the direction of Marion Montgomery at the University of Georgia. He lectured on the work of various Southern authors: the Southern Agrarians, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, M. E. Bradford, Richard Weaver, and Walker Percy. He also has written essays and reviews for various journals of scholarship and opinion, including Chronicles, Touchstone, The Southern Partisan, Modern Age, The Intercollegiate Review, The South Carolina Review, The Southern Humanities Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and The University Bookman. In 2005, he selected and edited a collection of Montgomery’s essays: On Matters Southern: Essays About Literature and Culture, 1964-2000.

Read the interview at ⁠www.fivebooksforcatholics.com/marion-montgomery/⁠

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