John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, each began his career as one of the coterie of southern poets centered at Vanderbilt University who attracted national attention with their publication of The Fugitive magazine in the early 1920s and the celebrated essays in I'll Take My Stand. Collectively known as the Fugitives (or Agrarians as they were later called) they became ardent and influential participants in the regionalist-proletarian literary controversies of the Depression decades.

Each of the four poets was personally concerned with the connection between their creative work and the social realities around them. In The Wary Fugitives Louis Rubin masterfully explores and illustrates the relationships between their poetry, novels, and literary criticism, and their work as social critics. He conducts, in the process, a revealing and provocative inquiry into the connection between American history and the twentieth-century South.