bio notes:
born: 11/19/1899
died: 2/9/1979
born as: John Orley Allen Tate

American poet, teacher, and novelist, and a leading exponent of the New Criticism. In both his criticism and his poetry, he emphasized the writer's need for a tradition to adhere to; he found his own tradition in the culture of the conservative, agrarian South and later, in Roman Catholicism, to which he was converted in 1950. Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature