TATE was born John Orley Allen Tate near Winchester, Kentucky, the son of John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. During Tate's childhood the business interests of his father-lumber, land sales, and stocks-forced the family to move as often as three times a year. As Tate later recalled, "we might as well have been living, and I been born, in a tavern at a crossroads." By 1911 his father's business ventures and his parents' marriage had failed. The youngest of three boys by almost ten years, Tate found himself in "perpetual motion" with his mother, a native Virginian whose family seat in Fairfax County later became the "Pleasant Hill" of Tate's only novel, The Fathers (1938).



