University of North Carolina Press Chapter Title: Appalachian Literature Chapter Author(s): JAMES B. GOODE Book Title: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Book Subtitle: Volume 9: Literature Book Editor(s): M. THOMAS INGE Published by: University of North Carolina Press. (2008) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469616643_inge.8 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University of North Carolina Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture This content downloaded from 76.77.171.221 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 15:20:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms able agriculture, vital community life, and connection to local places. However, as farming ceases to be a way of life in the South and elsewhere, the coherent philosophy it once represented will likely lose much of its impact or find a new mode of expression. M. THOMAS INGE Randolph-Macon College M. Tomas Inge, ed., Agrarianism in American Literature (1969); Mark G. Malvasi, Te Unregenerate South: Te Agrarian Tought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson (1997); Leo Marx, Te Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (1964); Henry Bamford Parkes, Te American Experience (1947); Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: Te South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). Appalachian Literature Te Appalachian region is loosely defined as a generally rural, moderately urbanized, and partly industrialized region in and around the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. More than 20 million people live in Appalachia, a heavily forested area roughly the size of the United Kingdom, covering largely mountainous, ofen isolated areas from the borders of Ala- bama and Georgia in the south to Pennsylvania and New York in the north. Between lie large areas of South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio. Te ethnic makeup is diverse, initially including immigrants from the British Isles and later eastern European ethnics, who followed industrialization of the region by timber and coal inter- ests. Te literature of Appalachia has coincided with distinct historical devel- opments including early exploration by Native Americans, hunters, trappers, and adventurers; a pioneer period characterized by scattered settlement and an agrarian life-style (barely interrupted by the Civil War); and a period of ex- ploitation of coal and wood beginning slightly before the 20th century, spawn- ing rapid in-migration; and a postindustrial period characterized by economic fluctuation prompting significant out-migration. Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose Manning in their landmark anthology Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia (1975) make a very important distinction between the themes of Appalachian writing and those of the South by suggesting that in- stead of focusing on the relationship of aristocrats, blacks, and poor whites, Appalachian literature centers upon the mountaineer and his struggles with himself, nature, and the outside world. APPALACHIAN LITERATURE 29 This content downloaded from 76.77.171.221 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 15:20:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Cratis Williams, in his classic dissertation on Appalachian literature (New York University, 1961), divided the literary-historical periods into three: early exploration to 1880, 1880–1930, and 1930 to the present. Scholars have since added a fourth period beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present. In an updated anthology, the two-volume Appalachia Inside Out (1995), Robert J. Higgs, Ambrose Manning, and Jim Wayne Miller parse Appalachian literary history into two broad categories—“Conflict and Change” and “Culture and Custom.” Te earliest recorded period of Appalachian literature began in the late 1600s and is identified as journal and diary entries by explorers, trappers, traders, ad- venturers, and those who were looking for settlement lands or had some invest- ment interests in the area. Many were matriculating from more populated areas in the Northeast. Several of these writings are honest, straightforward accounts of encounters with Native Americans and pioneer life in the region; others have a distinct, romanticized, James Fennimore Cooper–like flavor, and still others are written from the perspective of the supposed more “civilized” outsider. In their 1975 anthology, Higgs and Manning include works from John Lederer, who began to write about the region in 1669; John Fontaine, whose journal published in 1838 included accounts of his travels into the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah Valley; Timothy Flint, whose Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone (1833) was perhaps the most widely read biography of the early 19th cen- tury; James Kirk Paulding, whose Letters from the South (1816) demonstrated the captivating qualities of the Appalachian Mountains; and Anne Newport Royal, called America’s first hitchhiker, who wrote of the unspoiled region in her Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the United States (1826). Examples from other sources ofen include portions of William Byrd’s History of the Di- viding Line Run in the Year 1728 (1728) and A Progress to the Mines (1732) and John Muir’s “Crossing the Cumberland Mountains” (an excerpt from his mem- oir A Tousand Mile Walk to the Gulf [1916]). Te second period of Appalachian literature began about 1885 and lasted well into the 1930s. Tese “local-color” writers were of the Mark Twain or Bret Harte tradition. Teir signature was the marketing to urban populations of odd characters and stories found in the somewhat isolated Appalachian Mountains. John Fox Jr. was perhaps the most accomplished of these. His Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) explored the theme of the Appalachian placed in the “foreign” environment of a Kentucky Bluegrass plantation, and Trail of the Lone- some Pine (1908) explored the “foreigner” coal company engineer placed in the Appalachian Mountains in southwest Virginia. Other notables include Mary Noailles Murfree (In the Tennessee Mountains [1884] and 25 other works, mostly 30 APPALACHIAN LITERATURE This content downloaded from 76.77.171.221 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 15:20:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms fiction set in the southern mountain area); Elizabeth Madox Roberts (Te Time of Man [1926] and Te Great Meadow [1930]); and Lucy Furman, who wrote realistic and positive sketches about the culture near Hindman Settlement School at Hindman, Ky., in her Mothering on Perilous (1913), Sight to the Blind (1914), Te Quare Women (1923), and Te Glass Window (1925). Many of these works were largely romantic and were ofen written in dialect. Sentimentality and neoromanticism merged with Appalachian stereotypes and motifs to set the tone until the 1930s. Feuding, the Civil War in Appalachia, moonshining, religious fundamentalism, and historical romance became common topics. Te post-1930 period spawned a vital group of writers who dominated the Appalachian literary scene well into the 1980s and 1990s, overlapping the next period that began in the 1960s. Among the outstanding members of the post- 1930 group were Kentuckian Jesse Stuart, with his more than 40 books covering biography, autobiography, novel, short story, poetry, essay, and journalism; Ken- tuckian Harriette Simpson Arnow, whose powerful novel about out-migration to the steel mills of Detroit, Mich., titled Te Dollmaker (1954) received national acclaim; adopted Kentuckian James Still, with his highly respected attention to art and craf in fiction, short story, and poetry in River of Earth (1940), On Troublesome Creek (1941), and Hounds on the Mountain (1937); North Carolin- ian Tomas Wolfe, the famed author of Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), Te Web and the Rock (1939), You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), and Te Hills Beyond (1941); West Virginia writer and 1977 National Book Award recipient Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet, including O Beulah Land (1956), Know Nothing (1960), Prisons (1973), and Te Scapegoat (1980); West Virginian Pearl Buck’s Te Good Earth (1931 winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal), Sons (1932), and A House Divided (1935); and Tennessean James Agee, who was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for A Death in the Family (1957). Dominant themes of this period in- cluded politics, religion, rural mountain life customs and traditions, industrial- ized mountain life, and economic displacement of Appalachians. In the 1960s the torch was being passed to another set of regional writers such as Wilma Dykeman, whose novel Tall Woman (1962) is the quintessential portrait of an Appalachian pioneer woman and the enduring role she has played in American history, and the hard-hitting, frank Harry Caudill, whose Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (1963) grabbed the attention of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson and is credited with having planted the seeds for the antipoverty programs of the 1960s. Others in this era included such notables as Jim Wayne Miller, Cormac McCarthy, Lillie D. Chaffin, Billy Edd Wheeler, Loyal Jones, and Jack Weller. Although the APPALACHIAN LITERATURE 31 This content downloaded from 76.77.171.221 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 15:20:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms themes of this period are as varied as the number of substantial writers, many of these works began to focus upon the postindustrial malaise brought on by environmental, economic, and social effects of the timber and coal industry.