The work was attacked by contemporaries, and current scholars believe it to be a reactionary and romanticized defense of the Old South and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

His 1973 memoir, A Wake for the Living, is a tour-de-force in Southern storytelling, combining a deep religious sensibility, an expansive view of history that links events across decades and even centuries, and—sometimes—bawdy family tales.

[citation needed] Lytle served as editor of the Sewanee Review from 1961 to 1973 while he was a professor at the University of the South.

Lytle taught literature and creative writing at the University of Florida, where he had Merrill Joan Gerber, Madison Jones and Harry Crews as students.

[citation needed] Lytle was the owner of Cornsilk, a historic house in Cross Plains, Tennessee, in the 1940s.