His second novel, Darrell, was published in 1964, and — in the words of his literary executor and former student Dr. Michael Jordan — "combines comedy, satire, and tragedy in its depiction of the misadventures of a country-born boy and his grandmother as they attempt to adjust to life in an Athens neighborhood.
In that novel, successful country music songwriter Walt Mason, disillusioned with life in Nashville, Tennessee, moves to rural Georgia to become a gentleman farmer, only to find out that such a life can't be "poured in from the top," but must spring up from the roots.
I Got a Gal and The Decline and Fall of Officer Fergerson appeared in Southern Writing in the Sixties (1966) and The Best American Short Stories: 1971, respectively.
His books of poetry include Dry Lightning (1960), Stones from the Rubble (1965), and The Gull and Other Georgia Scenes (1969).
He was perhaps the leading figure in what some have called the "second generation" of Fugitive/Agrarian writers — writers who, like O'Connor herself, were too young to be the contemporaries of those such as Andrew Nelson Lytle, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, but who shared many of their literary and intellectual sensibilities.