Except for some casual statements about his being a writer, the many detailed accounts of family history and legend that appear almost unchanged in [Lytle's] stories and novels are the only reminders of Lytle's literary career that appear in A Wake for the Living. Few of his literary friends and associates are mentioned, and there is no account of his relationship to the Fugitive and Agrarian movements. Only the freshness and immediacy of the stories he tells—many of which are told in the understated deadpan manner of the best humorists—and the uncanny ability to select the right detail to evoke the desired response mark this loosely joined series of family anecdotes as unmistakably the work of one of our most distinguished contemporary writers.

Lytle began his family chronicle, he says, so that he could tell his daughters who they are…. In chronicling his own family history he follows the development of the American nation: early settlement, the revolution, the skirmishes with the Indians, the rapid transition in the South from pioneer settlement to plantation, the Civil War, reconstruction, the New South up to the present. Very early in his account he discounts the notion that America was the new Garden of Eden, that in America a New Adam could begin again. That he does not believe that life in America or any other part of the world is exempt from the consequences of the Fall is obvious…. (pp. 731-32)

A Wake for the Living suggests, however, that the unfragmented life was possible, in the South at least, until the 1930s: "The communal life was shattered, but it hadn't fallen but was ready to, at the slightest shock. The sense of the family was still alive, and it is the family's sense of itself which gives freedom. Unless you know where you belong in the divisions of order, you lack the conventions of intercourse. It is function maintained by manners which gives freedom. Wherever you are, you know who you are. When you act, you act instinctively out of this knowledge."

What Lytle's book deals with finally is what Malcolm Cowley once referred to as the legend of the South and what Tate says should properly be referred to as the southern myth since no one invented it. (pp. 733-34)