C. Vann Woodward was born in 1908 in the Arkansas hamlet of
Vanndale and grew up in. Morrilton, a small town on the
Arkansas River fifty miles above Little Rock. His family was
rooted several generations deep in Southern soil; his father was
a public-school administrator and later a college dean; during his
high-school and college years Woodward knew Rupert Vance,
Howard Odum, and Will Alexander, intellectuals and liberals
who were trying to push the South in the direction of greater
cosmopolitanism and racial tolerance. From these associations
Woodward absorbed influences that were to help shape the course
and concerns of his career
