[Porter was an American short story writer, novelist, critic, and educator whose fiction evokes the region and culture of the American Southwest. Her popular 1962 novel, Ship of Fools, derived from a voyage Porter took in 1931 from Vera Cruz to Bremerhaven, is often considered an allegory relating the moral malaise of the world prior to World War II. Gordon and Porter were well-acquainted; at one point Porter resided at Gordon's Clarksville, Tennessee, home. In the following review, Porter provides a highly laudatory assessment of None Shall Look Back.]

Fontaine Allard, tobacco planter, slave holder full of cares and responsibilities, an old man walking in a part of his Kentucky woods, "had a strange feeling, as if a voice said to him, 'these are your father's and your fathers' before him' … he had actually for a moment been overcome by his attachment for that earth, those trees." This is in the beginning of None Shall Look Back. Toward the end, his son Ned returns from the lost war, a skeleton, a dying man. "The land's still there, I reckon," he says, and goes back to it, hoping to live, but certain at least that he shall die there, where he belongs, unchanged in his belief in the way of life he had fought for.

His brother Jim, unfit for war, had stayed at home and profited by the changing times, taking advantage of his chances with the rising merchants and industrialists. Alienated, hostile, secretly hoping that Ned may die, he watches him go, a breathing reproach, supported by two women of his family. Miss Gordon makes it quite clear, in this short bitter scene, that Jim is the truly defeated man, the lost soul who thinks nothing is worth fighting for, who sets himself to survive and profit meanly by whatever occasion offers him.

This form of opportunism is sometimes at present called "interpreting history correctly"—that is, having the foresight to get on the bandwagon and make the most of the parade. With such shabbiness Miss Gordon has nothing to do. Her story is a legend in praise of heroes, of those who fought well and lost their battle, and their lives. It seems fresh and timely at this moment when we have before our eyes the spectacle of a death-dedicated people holding out in a struggle against overwhelming odds. Of all human impulses, that of heroism changes least in its character and shape, from one epoch to another. He is forever the same, then and forever unanswerable, the man who throws his life away as if he hated living, in defense of the one thing, whatever it may be, that he cares to live for. Causes change perpetually, die, go out of fashion, are superseded according to shifting political schemes, economics, religions, but the men ready to die for them are reborn again and again, always the same men.

Miss Gordon's heart is fixed on the memory of those men who died in a single, superbly fought lost cause, in nothing diminished for being lost, and this devotion has focused her feelings and imagination to a point of fire. She states clearly in every line of her story her mystical faith that what a man lives by, he must if the time comes, die for; to live beyond or to acknowledge defeat is to die twice, and shamefully. The motive of this faith is the pride of Lucifer, and Miss Gordon makes no pretense, either for herself or for her characters, to the maudlin virtue of humility in questions of principle.

All-seeing as an ancient chronicler, she has created a panorama of a society engaged in battle for its life. The author moves about, a disembodied spectator timing her presence expertly, over her familiar territory, Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi. Time, 1860 to 1864, dates which are, after 1776, the most portentous in the history of this country. Having chosen to observe from all points of view, rather than to stand on a knoll above the battle and watch a set procession of events through a field glass, she makes her scenes move rapidly from Federal lines to Confederate, from hospitals to prisons, to the plantations; the effect could easily have become diffuse without firm handling, and the central inalterable sympathies of the chronicler herself. She might have done the neat conventional thing, and told her story through the adventures of her unlucky young pair of lovers, Lucy Churchill and her cousin, Rives Allard. But they take their proper places in the midst of a tragedy of which their own tragedy is only a part. I know of nothing more humanly touching and immediate than the story of the brief, broken marriage of Rives and Lucy; but the book is not theirs, nor was it meant to be. Rives goes to die as a scout for Nathan Bedford Forrest, that unaccountable genius of war, who remained a mystery and a figure of legend even to his own soldiers, those who knew him best. There is no accounting for Forrest and Miss Gordon does not attempt the impossible. He remains what he was, a hero and a genius.

The Allard family is a center, or rather, a point of departure and return: in the beginning they are clearly seen alive, each one a human being with his individual destiny which gradually is merged with the destiny of his time and place. Their ends are symbolically exact: the old man lapses into the escape of imbecility, the old mother into perpetual blind grief, Rives into death in battle, Jim into moral dry rot, Lucy into numbness. In the meantime, we have seen them as they were born to be, busy with the full rich occupations of family life, the work of the plantation, the unpretentious gayety. Life for the Kentucky planters was never so grand as it was in Virginia and Louisiana or even in Mississippi, with its slightly parvenu manners, if one takes Mr. Stark Young's account at face value. The Kentucky planters were down-to-earth men, and the most tenderly bred women were not above taking a hand in the cookery. They much more resembled Madame Washington than they did Mr. Young's jewelry-conscious belles. This tone is here, properly; it pervades the book like a fresh aroma of green woods and plowed fields.

This seems to me in a great many ways a better book than Penhally or Aleck Maury, Sportsman, Miss Gordon's other two novels. The good firm style, at once homely, rhythmical and distinguished, is in all three of them, but at its best, so far, in None Shall Look Back. It is true I know her story by heart, but I have never heard it told better. The effect is of brilliant, instant life; there is a clear daylight over a landscape I need not close my eyes to see, peopled with figures I know well. I have always known the end, as I know the end of so many tales of love, and heroism, and death. In this retelling, it all happened only yesterday. Those men on the field are not buried yet, those women have just put on their mourning.

Katherine Anne Porter, "Dulce et Decorum Est," in The New Republic, Vol. LXXXX, No. 1165, March 31, 1937, pp. 244-45.