Novelist, dramatist, essayist, professor of literature, and "famously hospitable host." He was the son of Robert Logan Lytle and Lillie Belle Nelson. Graduated from Sewanee Military Academy. He attended Exeter College in Oxford, Englad, then Vanderbilt in Nashville where he graduated in 1925. Studied acting at Yale University; performed on Broadway as a young adult. In 1938, Lytle married Edna Barker, and they had three daughters. Helped start the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Florida. He also taught at Vanderbilt, Universities of Florida, Iowa, and Kentucky, and Kenyon College. He lived in his ancestral log house in Monteagle when he returned to Tennessee, where he was professor at University of the South, and editor of The Sewanee Review from 1961-1973. Author of novels, short stories, and essays, including Bedford Forrest and His Critter Comany (1931), The Velvet Horn (1957), A Wake for the Living (1973), and Kristin: A Reading (1992). He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship three times (1940, 1941, 1960).

Excerpt from the Tennessee Encyclopedia:
Lytle was ... a man of enormous charm, lyrical storytelling gifts, and a fixed world view that lasted until his death in December 1995 at Monteagle. Celebrated more in the South, particularly in upcountry states like his native Tennessee, than in the rest of the country, he was chiefly an artist, a literary man whose history, novels, and stories rank, in quality, with the better-known work of William Faulkner. Lytle kept his eye on the permanent things; he always thought in epic, mythic terms--then brought overarching themes down to earth. "Now that I have come to live in a sense of eternity," he wrote in his family chronicle A Wake for the Living (1975), "I can tell my girls who they are." He spent his life telling his three daughters, and the rest of us, exactly where we all came from.