“Chapter 4 Writing about Appalachia and of Appalachia: Contextualizing Appalachian Literature since the Civil War” in “Accessible Appalachia”
Writing about Appalachia and of Appalachia: Contextualizing Appalachian Literature since the Civil War
Erin Presley
Appalachian literature resists easy categorization and demands that difficult questions be confronted for study and analysis. While the contested physical and historical boundaries of Appalachia complicate identifying who counts as an Appalachian writer and what works are of the region, Appalachian literature has often been considered part of Southern literature. As Danny Miller and others contend, this categorization misses much of the nuance of writings from the Mountain South and the fact that Southern literature is typically “more Gothic and more concerned with North-South conflicts” than Appalachian literature.[1] Writers began considering these issues in earnest in the 1960s with the publication of The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, and interest in codifying Appalachian literature has continued apace.[2] Before, during, and after these critical discussions of history and categorization took place, poets, novelists, dramatists, and essayists have continued writing about and from Appalachia, from post–Civil War local color writers to Affrilachian writers in the 21st century.
In 2015, W. D. Weatherford and Wilma Dykeman interrogated the status of “Literature since 1900” in the region by highlighting significant works by writers such as James Still and Thomas Wolfe. They present these writers’ works, especially Wolfe’s, as examples of what Appalachian literature could be—“writing that springs from regional sources but is also in the mainstream of a great literary tradition.”[3] Similarly, Jim Wayne Miller took up this line of inquiry in 1977, identifying Cratis D. Williams’s work as “the most comprehensive study of Appalachian literature to date.”[4] Williams’s work focuses on stereotypical depictions of Appalachian people in local color writing, and he analyzes the mountaineer as a popular characterization. Miller goes on to argue that “the most vigorous literature of the Appalachian region, the writing which is an expression of the region and not a report on it, is concerned very much with the things of this world, situated squarely in the secular realm.”[5] Indeed, Miller’s distinction between of and on must inform any consideration of Appalachian literature. In 1985, Anne Shelby built upon the foundation created by Weatherford, Dykeman, Williams, and Miller in her quest to further define the region’s literature, and she uses Henry Shapiro’s historical work on the “invention” of Appalachia to develop her framework for situating Appalachian literature in the broader context of American literature. According to Shelby, it is only in the years following the Civil War that “the idea that the mountainous sections of several southern states represent something unique in America” gained traction.[6] She argues that “from the idea of Appalachia as behind the times, it was an easy step and one soon taken to the depiction of Appalachia, not as behind, but as inherently different from the rest of the country.”[7] Shelby’s work reflects much of the literature written about the region, including popular novels such as James Dickey’s Deliverance and the subsequent film adaptation in the 1970s, which reinforced damaging stereotypes about violence and backwardness in the region. In 2015, Chris Green and Erica Abrams Locklear explored Appalachian literature through its relationship with Appalachian Studies and broadened the scope of their analysis to include the work of Cherokee and Black authors from the region.[8] In 2020, Katherine Ledford and Theresa Lloyd provided an even more expansive and inclusive definition of the region’s literature beginning with the Cherokee oral tradition, moving toward historical texts by Thomas Jefferson and Booker T. Washington, and closing with the contemporary community arts organization Higher Ground.
These foundational studies of Appalachian literature show how the tension between insiders and outsiders has shaped and continues to influence Appalachian identity and the region’s literature. By exploring this tension, watershed works such as Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders (1913), James Still’s River of Earth (1940), Lee Smith’s Oral History (1983), and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997) highlight the shift from fictional depictions about Appalachia as backward and dangerous to more thoughtful renderings of the region and its people. Key themes arise, such as the role of education, the influence of the past on the present, and the importance of place in significant novels, short fiction, and poetry. Finally, contemporary Appalachian literature of the 21st century tackles weighty issues of diversity, inclusion, and exploitation in the region written by a variety of contemporary writers, who represent a broad spectrum of experiences in the region; authors' gender and racial representation has also become more equally balanced between women, men, and non-binary writers as well as a much larger community of writers of color.
At the turn of the 20th century, most published writing about central and southern Appalachia focused on travel and exploration in the region. These writers, most of whom were not from the area, presented Appalachia as a place apart from the rest of the country. Regarding Appalachia as an unexplored wilderness led to two distinct presentations of the region and its people: one highlighted the natural beauty of the mountains; the other depicted it as the back of beyond and the people as being out of step with contemporary American values. Defining characteristics of these works include an emphasis on the region’s striking landscape, especially in travel writing from this era, and stereotypical depictions of the people, including an emphasis on dialect and difference. In Seekers of Scenery: Travel Writing from Southern Appalachia, 1840-1900, Kevin O’Donnell and Helen Hollingsworth present curated publications from this time period and provide insightful context for these works. In the introduction, O’Donnell situates these works in time and place, arguing that the selections “show how the image of the mountaineer—the idea of a distinct, White, southern Appalachian population—emerged in the national consciousness.”[9] Further, the works included in this collection reflect the time in which they were written, as the nation was undergoing transformative changes during the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution.
Mary Noailles Murfree (1850-1922), who initially published under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, was one of the most prominent local color writers in the region, basing her late 19th century fictional works such as The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885) in the mountains of northeast Tennessee, where her affluent middle-Tennessee family vacationed. During her lifetime, Murfree enjoyed commercial success from her novels and short stories, many of which were published in magazines, but her critical legacy is more complicated. Most scholars find Murfree’s work to reinforce the myth of Appalachia as “isolated, poor, uneducated, all white, and starkly divided in its gender roles with patriarchal, active men and passive, unambitious women.”[10] Elizabeth Engelhardt acknowledges the problematic nature of Murfree’s works but argues convincingly that “the way Murfree writes about women is subtle and complex and that the outsiders in her stories are as fallible as the local mountain characters—and treated with equal suspicion by the narrator.”[11] In addition to Engelhardt’s argument for reconsidering Murfree’s works, O’Donnell also makes the case for taking Murfree’s contributions to the genre of local color more seriously because of their connection to travel writing.[12]
Another prominent writer during this time period was Horace Kephart (1862-1931), a former librarian and outdoor enthusiast who sought refuge from his troubled life in St. Louis in the mountains of western North Carolina in the early 1900s and became a vocal proponent of the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. While Kephart indisputably helped the region through his advocacy for protecting the Smokies as a national park, his characterizations of locals in his short fiction and quasi-sociological study Our Southern Highlanders (1913) occasionally perpetuate damaging stereotypes of the lawless mountaineers and “their amazing isolation.”[13] Initially published in serial form in the magazine Outing starting in 1912, Our Southern Highlanders was a success for Kephart, both critically and commercially upon its publication. Complicating Kephart’s legacy is the critical divide between his reception among contemporary social scientists and literary authors. Most historians minimize Kephart’s contributions to the region and its literature, labeling him “a local-color writer” and “an eccentric.”[14][15] Conversely, prominent fiction writers such as Robert Morgan and Ron Rash deeply value Kephart’s work, as seen in their literary treatment of him. In Morgan’s 1979 poem “Horace Kephart,” the speaker describes Kephart:
Lean as a mountaineer himself, galluses
swung at his sides, he scribbles to the young
his intensity of woodcraft, weapons, survival,
and of the hillmen his archaic friends and landlords,
makers of spirits.[16]
Morgan treats Kephart seriously and respectfully in this poem as he acknowledges his subject’s shortcomings–“a vast unpayable obligation” to the family he left behind—and his commitment to “his archaic friends” on Hazel Creek.[17],[18]
In a similar vein, Ron Rash includes a flattering depiction of Kephart as a minor character in Serena (2008), his most successful novel to date, in which Kephart helps one of the main characters escape harm from the villainous lumber magnates. In Serena, Rash emphasizes Kephart’s commitment to the creation of a national park in the region, proclaiming him the “bard of Appalachia.”[19] Additionally, Rash renders Kephart as a kind-hearted ally through his support of the local characters, McDowell and Rachel, especially when Rachel flees with her young son, Jacob. Not only does Kephart provide mother and child with shelter and food as they begin their escape, but he also thoughtfully attends to Jacob’s needs—giving the child a bottle, showing him baby foxes, and giving him a sock for a new marble collection. Rash goes to great lengths to present the novel’s most significant historical figure-as-character in a positive light, and Kephart’s treatment of Rachel and Jacob proves to be one of his most redeeming moments. In the “Author’s Picks: Appalachian Reading” section found in some editions of the novel, Rash recommends Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders, reflecting the importance of this work in the study of Appalachian literature.
A major shift occurred in Appalachian literature around 1929 when prominent modernist writers from and of the region began publishing their works and receiving critical acclaim. Foremost among these writers are Thomas Wolfe, James Still, and Jesse Stuart, who challenged stereotypes about Appalachia through their novels, short fiction, and poetry. Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, published in 1929, became the first novel by an Appalachian writer to receive serious critical attention and quickly made Wolfe a literary star. Despite the national attention Wolfe’s novel received, many people in western North Carolina took issue with his depiction of the area. For example, in 1930, Horace Kephart wrote in a letter, “Have just read Wolfe’s abomination Look Homeward, Angel. They say he will be shot if he ever returns to Asheville. Any creature who will blackguard his own father, mother, brothers and sisters, through 600 pages of print, should be shot.”[20] Similar sentiments arose in Asheville, where “the public library would not shelve Wolfe’s books for more than six years after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel.”[21] Much of this criticism reflects a feeling that Wolfe betrayed his hometown through his autobiographical novel by writing about Asheville through his fictional Altamont and its residents. After seven years away, including graduate school at Harvard and residence in New York City, Wolfe returned to western North Carolina shortly before his untimely death in 1938. Outside of the harsh reaction in some quarters of Asheville, the novel and Wolfe’s work in general garnered praise, including Weatherford and Dykeman’s pronouncement that “a regional literature that can include in its achievement the universality of Thomas Wolfe has cause for pride in the past and hope for the future.”[22] Wolfe continues to receive critical attention through scholarly journals such as The Thomas Wolfe Review and an edited reissue in 2000 of Look Homeward, Angel with Wolfe’s original title, O, Lost: A Story of the Buried Life.
Contrasting Wolfe’s experience of leaving the region to write about it, James Still was an outsider who made rural Appalachia his home and setting for his literary works. Moving from Alabama, settling in Knott County, Kentucky, and working as a librarian at the Hindman Settlement School, Still published his novel River of Earth in 1940, a work of Appalachian literature. While the novel employs dialect and stereotypes, Still’s nuanced treatment of the child narrator and struggling family in eastern Kentucky’s coal country presents the characters as multidimensional and moves beyond the harmful tropes highlighted in earlier works. Unlike Kephart and Wolfe, Still’s critical reception has consistently been positive, as his works are less about Appalachia and reflect more of the experience of the people living in the region. Published in 1940, Still’s River of Earth follows one family’s fraught relationship with coal mining in eastern Kentucky through the eyes of a child narrator. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the family’s father insists on moving the family from one mining camp to the next for work, much to the mother’s dismay. Significantly, the mother tells her husband, “I allus wanted my young’uns to larn to figure and read writing” in hopes of their having a better life, a desire that subverts a common stereotype about Appalachia’s hostility toward formal education.[23]
Education plays an important role in other modernist works, including short fiction by Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Jesse Stuart. In Roberts’s “On the Mountainside” (1932), young Newt must leave his mountain home in eastern Kentucky to continue his education in the settlements. As he makes the arduous journey from his home to the closest settlement school, he encounters an old man who is desperately trying to return to the mountain home he left many years ago. The old man says, “I was a plumb traitor to my God when I left the mountains and come to the settlements.”[24] The old man’s words resonate with Newt’s doubts about leaving his family and home to go to school, but ultimately, Newt chooses to stay the course and continue his education at the settlement school even if it means never returning home.
Jesse Stuart also addresses education in eastern Kentucky in “The Split Cherry Tree” (1939) but presents a more nuanced understanding than Roberts’s Faustian view. In this story, Dave and his classmates break a farmer’s cherry tree during a school excursion in pursuit of a lizard for science class. The farmer demands payment for the ruined tree, and the boys’ teacher, Professor Herbert, agrees. The other boys are able to pay their share, but Dave, having no money, borrows the dollar from the teacher and must stay after school to clean to settle his debt. Dave’s father is furious when he learns why his son is so late getting home and decides to accompany his son to school the next day, stating, “He ain’t got no right to keep you in and let the other boys off jist because they’ve got th’ money. I’m a poor man. A bullet will go in a professor same as it will any man. It will go in a rich man same as it will a poor man.”[25] Initially full of dread about what will happen at school, Dave watches as Professor Herbert shows Pa around the school and explains the students’ studies as they enjoy conversation over lunch together. By the end of the day, Pa tells Dave, “He [Professor Herbert] likes me. I like ‘im. We jist had to get together. He had the remedies. He showed me. You must go on to school.”[26] In Stuart’s story, the young protagonist does not have to leave his home and family to get an education like Roberts’s Newt, offering a complex treatment of Appalachian attitudes about education.
Significant mid-20th century works such as James Agee’s A Death in the Family (1957) and Harriette Simpson Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954) shift the setting from rural Appalachia to urban areas, disrupting the common misconception of the region’s physical isolation. Agee’s posthumously published novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and tells the story of a Knoxville family forever changed by the death of the father in a car accident. Like Wolfe before him, James Agee drew on his own experiences to craft this autobiographical novel, which still receives critical attention. For example, Michael Lofaro has edited two collections of essays on Agee’s work: James Agee: Reconsiderations (1992) and Agee Agonistes: Essays on the Life, Legend, and Works of James Agee (2007). While Agee’s work is wholly set in Appalachia, Knoxville’s city blocks, sidewalks, streetlights, and automobiles are as commonplace as children’s education, as a father says of his son, “That’s my boy . . . Six years old, and he can already read like I couldn’t read when I was twice his age.”[27]
While Agee’s book is an autobiography that focuses on the individual and collective grief of a family following the death of the father, Harriette Simpson Arnow’s The Dollmaker is a work of social realism that shifts from rural eastern Kentucky to industrial Detroit as the Nevels family joins the outmigration of Appalachian families desperately looking for work during that time period. The Dollmaker focuses on the character of Gertie, an Appalachian woman and mother who struggles to transition from an agrarian life in which she “had been capable of almost anything” to the overwhelming metropolis of Detroit. Her husband, convinced that wartime factory work is the key to his family’s economic freedom, makes the decisions for the family, and the novel secures its place within American naturalism as their Kentucky roots are severed and transplanted in industrial Detroit, too deep in debt to attempt a return. Like Agee and Wolfe, Arnow earned critical attention and accolades, including a nomination for the 1955 National Book Award.
While Agee’s and Arnow’s works present a nuanced view of Appalachia, James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) recklessly uses damaging stereotypes about the region that continue to inform outside opinions of the Mountain South. Set in northeast Georgia, the novel tells the story of four friends from Atlanta who take an ill-fated trip to the mountains. As Miller and others point out, what ensues “remains one of the worst pictures of the mountain people as inbred, suspicious, violent, and bestial.”[28] The film adaptation of Deliverance (1972) strengthened the endurance of these stereotypes through caricatures of Appalachian people. Indisputably, Deliverance was both a critical and commercial success for Dickey but at the expense of an entire region.
After the damage wrought by Dickey’s depiction of the region, Lee Smith’s Oral History (1983) ushered in a new era for Appalachian literature, as literary works began to reflect more of the area and less about it. Structured as a frame story in which Jennifer, a granddaughter raised away from the ancestral Hoot Owl Holler, seeks to investigate a supposedly haunted family cabin for an oral history project in college, the novel tells the story of the Cantrell family of southwest Virginia. Smith uses a series of first-person narrators beginning with Granny Younger, a friend of the Cantrell family, and ending with Sally, Jennifer’s aunt and a voice of the family’s previous generation. Smith also includes an outsider as a narrator, Richard Burlage, a teacher who travels to southwest Virginia from Richmond in 1923. Upon his arrival, Burlage notes that “this mountainous region [is] a stranger land than Richmond can conceive of.”[29] Through these complex and sometimes conflicting voices, Smith treats the region and its people with gravity and respect, producing one of the finest novels of Appalachia.
In a similar vein, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997) offers a thoughtful and sophisticated Appalachian story. Both a critical and commercial success, the novel won the National Book Award in 1997, stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 61 weeks, and was adapted into an acclaimed film. Unlike earlier successful works from the region, such as Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and Agee’s A Death in the Family, Frazier’s novel is inherently Appalachian in its sensibility. Set during the Civil War, the novel focuses on three characters’ experiences of love and loss but also tells the story of Appalachia’s fraught position during this tumultuous time. Frazier captures the divide between Union and Confederate loyalties in Appalachia through his characterization of Inman, a young man who joins the Confederacy but decides to desert the cause and return to his mountain home. Frazier also treats the importance of place through Inman, Ada, and Ruby, each of whom is connected to the land. Through Ada and Ruby’s friendship, Frazier complicates what it means to be educated and highlights the importance of being in tune with the natural world. Ruby’s understanding and use of medicinal herbs and farming practices—her “grandmother knowledge”—plays an important role in the novel much in the same vein as Granny Younger’s character in Lee Smith’s Oral History.[30]
As evidenced by novels such as Oral History and Cold Mountain, contemporary Appalachian literature is decidedly of Appalachia. In recent years, writers including Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Pancake, and Ron Rash have consistently shown the complexity of Appalachia and the abiding connection to place experienced by many from the region. Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer (2000) is set in eastern Kentucky and focuses on four characters as their narratives intertwine, including the evolution of the family farm in a post-tobacco economy and the restoration of the American chestnut tree. Kingsolver’s characters challenge what it means to be Appalachian. For example, Lusa is an outsider who inherits her deceased husband’s family farm in rural eastern Kentucky. Early in the novel, Nannie Rawley, another main character who practices sustainable farming at her orchard, tells Lusa, “You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”[31] Drawing on her formal education and her love for her husband, she devises a way to make the farm profitable while she also builds meaningful relationships with her in-laws and becomes a member of the community. Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead (2022) also explores identity in Appalachia.[32] Set in southwest Virginia in the 1990s, Damon Fields tells his life story in a narrative that models itself after Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, which concerns an orphaned boy and is set in Victorian England in the 1840s. Damon’s coming-of-age story highlights issues with systemic poverty and drug addiction in the region as well as the power of people who care, such as dedicated teachers and friends in helping one young person heal.
Relationships are also important in Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007), a novel about one family’s experience of the devastating effects of mountaintop removal in West Virginia. Told from the family members’ perspectives, the novel illustrates the environmental and psychological damage wrought by coal mining and the importance of place to many of the characters, especially Lace and Bant. Rash’s Serena (2008) also emphasizes a connection to the land as it tackles the ecological impact of the lumber industry in western North Carolina in the late 1920s. Rachel, a young local woman who must eventually leave her mountain home, comes to understand the words Widow Jenkins shared with her: “It would have been wrong to take you away from these mountains, because if you’re born here they’re a part of you. No other place will ever feel right.”[33] This deep and abiding connection to the land also appears in Rash’s description of Rachel and Jacob’s poignant last time on Colt Ridge in western North Carolina:
Rachel kneeled beside Jacob. She took the child’s hand and pressed it to the dirt. Her father had told Rachel that Harmons had been on this land since before the Revolutionary War. “Don’t ever forget what it feels like, Jacob,” she whispered, and let her hand touch the ground as well.[34]
With an emphasis on place, these novels also address significant environmental issues resulting from the use of natural resources in Appalachia.
Place also shapes the works of LGBTQQIAAP2S+ writers from Appalachia. In her poetry collection WWJD and Other Poems (2019), Savannah Sipple examines her identity as a queer Appalachian woman. For example, in “South Fork, Kentucky River,” the speaker illustrates how place plays a formative role by personifying South Fork, who “lives in the shadows of the mountains just big enough / to mine.”[35] Addressing South Fork directly as her audience and evoking coal mining in the region, the persona describes her relationship with South Fork as troubled, noting, “You can’t wash him out.”[36] The speaker closes with South Fork’s ongoing influence:
South Fork will tug that string in your belly,
the one way down deep, and even when you’re far away and glad of it,
even if you’ve never left, a part of you will ache cause you might
try to leave South Fork, but, honey, South Fork don’t ever leave you.[37]
This powerful statement on the enduring hold of this river region on the speaker reflects a common theme in recent Appalachian works about the unbreakable connection to place.
Silas House also uses a river and subsequent flood to explore LGBTQQIAAP2S+ issues in his 2018 novel, Southernmost. Initially set in rural Tennessee, the novel follows a Pentecostal preacher’s journey from intolerance to tolerance and love as he seeks to reconcile with his gay brother. In 2023, House was named Kentucky’s poet laureate, the first openly gay writer to serve in the role. Family ties are also significant in Carter Sickels’s The Prettiest Star (2020), as a young man with AIDS in the 1980s returns to his Appalachian hometown in southern Ohio to die.
A connection to place also informs much of the work of Affrilachian poets, who confront the myth of a White Appalachia through their writings. Frank X Walker, who coined the term Affrilachia, explores what it means to be a Kentuckian in his poem “Kentucke,” dedicated to James Still:
i too am of the hills
my folks
have corn rowed
tobacco
laid track
strip mined
worshiped & whiskied
from Harlan to Maysville
old Dunbar to Central.[38]
These lines show the speaker’s identity is inextricably linked to the past and present of Kentucky, from its tobacco farming to its coal mining, from one end of the state to the other. Appointed as Kentucky’s youngest poet laureate from 2013 to 2015, Walker was also the first Black author to hold the position.
From 2021 to 2022, Crystal Wilkinson was Kentucky’s second Black writer to serve as poet laureate in the state. Her poetry also evokes the history of Kentucky’s economy and her own family history, as seen in her poem “O Tobacco.” The speaker remembers her grandfather and his tireless work in the tobacco fields. Addressing tobacco, the speaker states,
Just like family you were
coddled
cuddled
coaxed
into making him proud.[39]
While Wilkinson received much acclaim for her volume of poetry called Perfect Black (2021), she is a multi-genre and genre-blending author, including works such as Blackberries, Blackberries (2000), Water Street (2002), The Birds of Opulence (2016), and Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts (2024), which is part memoir, part recipe book. The Affrilachian poets provide a more expansive view of the region and Appalachian identity through recognizing tradition while acknowledging the unhealthy aspects of living in Kentucky, such as generational labor in tobacco and coal.
Appalachian literature is expansive in genre as well as in representation of identity. Robert Gipe is a novelist and community organizer who has been part of the outdoor drama production of Higher Ground in Harlan since its origin in 2008 and continues to make sure the performances are timely. Gipe has also received high acclaim for his graphic novels Trampoline (2015), Weedeater (2020), and Pop (2021), which form his Canard County Trilogy. His works feature working-class Appalachian characters who confront issues like addiction, environmental justice, and violence.
Ultimately, Appalachian literature at its best shows the region and its people in their nuanced complexity, not as caricatures. While local color writers relied on stereotypes, the travel-writing aspect of that movement inspired people like Horace Kephart to work tirelessly to protect the Great Smoky Mountains and inspired contemporary writers like Robert Morgan and Ron Rash to pick up the mantle. Modernist writers of Appalachia set a high standard for those who followed and proved that one need not be from Appalachia to become of it. Contemporary Appalachian writers continue this tradition of writing of and for the region as they highlight environmental and social justice issues in their works as well as the diversity of experience among Appalachian people. In Appalachian Elegy (2012), bell hooks captures this sentiment:
While I do not claim an identity as Appalachian, I do claim a solidarity, a sense of belonging, that makes me one with the Appalachian past of my ancestors, black, Native American, white, all “people of one blood” who made homeplace in isolated landscapes where they could invent themselves, where they could savor a taste of freedom.[40]
This sense of unity and purpose characterizes literature of Appalachia, and with so many current Appalachian writers’ attendance at the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, this generation of authors continues creating works that present the rich complexity of the region and its people, supporting each other’s artistry, and carving a deep Appalachian niche in American literature.
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Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. New York: Grove, 1997.
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Smith, Lee. Oral History. New York: Berkley Books, 1983.
Still, James. River of Earth. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1978.
Stuart, Jesse. “The Split Cherry Tree.” The Best-Loved Short Stories of Jesse Stuart. Edited by H. Edward Richardson, 135-47. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1982.
Walker, Frank X. “Kentucke.” In Affrilachia, 95-97. Lexington, KY: Old Cove, 2000.
Weatherford, W.D., and Wilma Dykeman. “Literature Since 1900.” In The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey. Edited by Thomas Ford, 259-70. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.
Wilkinson, Crystal. “O Tobacco.” In Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets.Edited by Bianca Lynne Spriggs and Jeremy Paden, 17-21. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018.
Williams, Betty Lynch. “Asheville and Thomas Wolfe: A Study in Changing Attitudes.” Appalachian Heritage 3 (2014): 34-53.
Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Scribner, 2006.
[1] Miller et al., “Appalachian Literature,” 199.
[2] Ford, The Southern Appalachian Region, v.
[3] Weatherford and Dykeman, “Literature since 1900,” 270.
[4] Miller, “Appalachian Literature,” 23.
[5] Ibid, 25.
[6] Shelby, “Appalachian Literature,” 31.
[7] Ibid, 32.
[8] Green and Locklear, “Writing Appalachia,” 62-87.
[9] O'Donnell and Hollingsworth, Seekers of Scenery, 2.
[10] Engelhardt, The Tangled Roots of Feminism, 103.
[11] Ibid, 103.
[12] O’Donnell and Hollingsworth, Seekers of Scenery, 26.
[13] Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 5.
[14] Brown, The Wild East, 104.
[15] Pierce, The Great Smokies, 58.
[16] Morgan, “Horace Kephart,” 21-25.
[17] Ibid, 10.
[18] Ibid, 24.
[19] Rash, Serena, 117.
[20] Mitchell, “Thomas Wolfe's ‘Abomination,’” 120.
[21] Williams, “Asheville and Thomas Wolfe,” 42.
[22] Weatherford and Dykeman, “Literature since 1900,” 270.
[23] Still, River of Earth, 80.
[24] Roberts, “On the Mountainside,” 10.
[25] Stuart, “The Split Cherry Tree,” 139.
[26] Ibid, 146-47.
[27] Agee, A Death in the Family, 16.
[28] Miller et al., “Appalachian Literature,” 203.
[29] Smith, Oral History, 107.
[30] Fraizer, Cold Mountain, 106.
[31] Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer, 73.
[32] “The 2023 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction.”
[33] Rash, Serena, 197.
[34] Ibid, 272.
[35] Sipple, “South Fork, Kentucky River,” 1-2.
[36] Ibid, 10.
[37] Ibid, 17-20.
[38] Walker, “Kentucke,” 95-97.
[39] Wilkinson, “O Tobacco,” 17-21.
[40] hooks, Appalachian Elegy, 4.
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