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.