| 1930 | Born October 20th in Ripley, Tennessee, to Lillian Wood and Robert Young Drake. |
| 1952 | Graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelors Degree in English. Took classes from Donald Davidson while at Vanderbilt. |
| 1953 | Graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Masters Degree in English. Masters Thesis titled Theme and Rationale in the Short Stories of Saki. |
| 1954 | Graduated from Yale University with a Masters in English. Met Cleanth Brooks while at Yale. |
| 1955 | Graduated from Yale University with a Doctor of Philosophy Degree. Dissertation titled Keats as Pastoral Poet: The Romantic Quest for Arcadia. |
| 1955-58 | Instructor in English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. While at Michigan he became friends with Austin Warren, who encouraged him to write stories. Also, met Russell Kirk, who was the editor of Modern Age. |
| 1958-61 | Instructor in English at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. During this time he became friends with Dean Peerman, editor of the Christian Century. |
| 1961-65 | Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. |
| 1962 | Visited Flannery O'Connor and her mother at Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia |
| 1965 | Published his first collection of stories, Amazing Grace, from Chilton Press. Won the Fiction Award at the Annual Texas Writers Roundup. |
| 1965-73 | Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. |
| 1966 | Published Flannery O'Connor The True Country, a booklet for Eerdmans Publishers Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective Series. |
| 1967 | Writer-in-Residence for the Writers' Conference, Glorieta,
New Mexico. Became friends with Allen Tate. |
| 1969 | Published the proceedings of the 1969 Southern Literary Festival, titled The Writer and His Traditions, for which he served as editor and as chairman of the festival. |
| 1971 | Published The Single Heart, from Aurora Publications. |
| 1973 | Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. |
| 1975 | Published The Burning Bush, from Aurora Publications. |
| 1976 | Wrote the Introduction for the University of Tennessee Press Tennesseana Editions Reprints of Tennessee Classics publication of Miss Minerva and William Green Hill by Frances Boyd Calhoun. |
| 1980 | Published The Home Place, from Memphis State University
Press. The Country of Robert Drake: Hearing and Understanding the voices of West Tennessee, Program at University of Tennessee. |
| 1981 | Second printing of Amazing Grace. |
| 1982 | While on Sabbatical, taught a course in Southern Fiction
at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Also, gave a lecture for the Bertie Wilson Murphy Symposium in Literature and Language at Hendrix College. |
| 1987 | Published Survivors and Others, from Mercer University Press. |
| 1990 | Published the Twenty-fifth Anniversary edition of Amazing
Grace, from Mercer University Press. Wrote the Introduction for Tennessee: A Photographic Celebration from American Graphic Publishing |
| 1991 | Featured writer at the SAMLA |
| 1993 | Published My Sweethearts's House: Memories, Fictions, from Mercer University Press. |
| 1996 | Published What Would You Do For an Encore? And Other Stories, from the Mercer University Press. |
| 1998 | Published The Home Place, the restored text, from Mercer University Press. |
| 1999 | Suffered a stroke and is no longer teaching full time at University of Tennessee. |
Overview | Robert Drake Biography
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File Listing: Boxes 1-13 | File
Listing:Boxes 14-24
Special Collections | Heard Library | Vanderbilt University
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