High Mountains Rising (35 page)

The 1976 book
Appalachian Literature: Critical Essays
(edited by Ruel E. Foster), by incorporating responses from several scholars to certain regional literary works, not only spurred critical debate in the late 1970s regarding the relative merits of those works but also encouraged in the then-nascent Appalachian studies movement the establishment and formal study of a canon of Appalachian literature. Unfortunately, neither that book nor
The Poetics of Appalachian Space
(edited by Parks Lanier Jr.), a 1991 collection of critical essays exploring regional literature, included a focused, comprehensive historical survey of Appalachian literature. The latter task addressed in 1977 by Jim Wayne Miller, whose article on the region's literary legacy, included in the “A Guide to Appalachian Studies” issue of
Appalachian Journal
, was succinct yet remarkably perceptive. However, Miller's article is outdated.

To be sure, all the aforementioned works, by challenging that era's elitist disapproval toward formal study of Appalachian culture, played some role in ensuring that Appalachian literature would be studied as a distinctive American regional literary canon. In
Voices from the Hills
, for instance, Higgs and Manning identified a distinction between literary works from Appalachia and those from the American South: “Whereas the literature of the Tidewater South has focused upon the relationship between aristocrats, Negroes, and poor whites, that of Southern Appalachia has centered upon the mountaineer, his struggles with himself, nature, and the outside world.”
⁴
Such a distinction was not always acknowledged by previous scholars, observed Higgs and Manning: “For the most part, Appalachia has been regarded as a poor but eccentric relation of the rest of the South and in anthologies passed off with a tall tale or two and a story illustrative of local color.”
⁵

However, Appalachian literature has changed in the twenty-five years since the publication of Miller's 1977 article. First, a profusion of new literature has been written about the region. Second, when constructing the Appalachian literary canon, previous scholars had focused largely on the literature of the highland areas and coalfields of Appalachia and had devoted far less attention to literature from the region's valley and urban areas. Third, the changing socioeconomic conditions and cultural attitudes in the region since the 1960s have inevitably influenced contemporary
Appalachian literature. Such changes necessitate reconsideration of the region's literary canon.

Although Williams's “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction” did not contain a comprehensive history of Appalachian literature, that dissertation did offer a useful structure (the identification of distinct phases in Appalachian literary history) through which to reassess all genres of regional literature. The following overview of Appalachian literature uses the historical framework from Williams's dissertation but includes in each of Williams's historical periods a broader cross-section of regional literary works from more literary genres. This chapter also updates Williams's framework by adding a new historical period encompassing the years 1960–2000.

The first of Williams's historical periods encompassed all writing about the region from the earliest English-speaking explorers through 1880. Two books that described explorations of the colonial frontier are
The Discoveries of John Lederer
(1672), German immigrant Lederer's account of his seventeenth-century explorations into the Virginia hills, and Virginia aristocrat William Byrd's
Histories of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina
, which was written in the 1720s and 1730s as a series of private diary sketches and was published in book form a century later (although Byrd in fact wrote about a geographic location east of Appalachia, his book epitomized the elitist attitude of the colonial gentry toward the Appalachian frontier populations). Of greater literary influence were two natural histories interpreting specific sections of Appalachia: William Bartram's
Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida
(written in the 1770s, published in 1791), and Thomas Jefferson's sole book publication,
Notes on the State of Virginia
(1784).

Among the most popular books in the United States in the nineteenth century was
Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone
(1833), Timothy Flint's biography of the Appalachian frontier's renowned settler. Throughout the nineteenth century, travel writing about the region—for the most part created by nonnatives during or after visits to Appalachia—was published in nationally distributed periodicals and books, promulgating to mass audiences both positive and negative images of Appalachia. Among the best known of these travel writers were James Kirke Paulding, who wrote
Letters from the South
(1816); Charles Lanman, whose books included
Letters from the Allegheny Mountains
(1849); Porte Crayon (a.k.a. David Hunter Strother), whose writings about western Virginia were collected in the book
Virginia Illustrated
(1857); and Bradford Torrey, author of A
World of Green Hills: Observations of Nature and Human Nature in the Blue Ridge
(1898).

Another type of literature associated with Appalachia in this historical period was written by authors steeped in the often humorous oral story
telling traditions of the frontier. The tall tales circulating around the western reaches of Appalachia in the early nineteenth century—marked by braggadocio, exaggeration, and bawdiness—gave rise by the 1830s to a literary tradition known as “Old Southwestern Humor” (so-named because such writings tended to be humorous and to be set in the Old Southwest, the area immediately to the west of southern Appalachia). Although also written outside Appalachia, “Old Southwestern Humor” was integrally associated with Appalachian Tennessee. The 1833 book
Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett
was not autobiographical as its title implied; instead, it was written anonymously by one of Crockett's political supporters—in an approximation of frontier speech to appeal to rural voters—for the purpose of bolstering the Tennessee congressman's reputation among his constituents. Although mentioning Crockett's East Tennessee background, this book's stories were more concerned with Crockett's alleged heroism in the West Tennessee wilderness (a heroism that was for the most part fabricated). The book failed to win Crockett sufficient votes during his 1835 reelection campaign, convincing him to leave Tennessee for Texas; after his heroic death in the Battle of the Alamo, the exaggerated representation in
Sketches and Eccentricities
of Crockett as an archetypal American frontiersman captured mainstream America's attention.

One of the more distinctive practitioners of “Old Southwestern Humor” was East Tennessee-based George Washington Harris, whose 1867 novel
Sut Lovingood
purported in its subtitle to contain “yarns” told by a “nat'ral born durn'd fool” living in the hills. Although that novel was beset with stereotypes, later writers (including Mark Twain and William Faulkner) praised it for its handling of folk dialect and its irreverent humor satirizing the “common man” of the American frontier.

Although few other Appalachia-related fictional works (and virtually no poetry or drama) of lasting literary quality were published in the historical period before 1880, two novels merit mention. The most widely acclaimed work of fiction by an author with indisputable ties to Appalachia in this period was Rebecca Harding Davis's 1861 novel
Life in the Iron Mills
, which portrayed the difficult lives of mill workers in the industrial city of Wheeling, Virginia (now in West Virginia). A more idealized depiction of Appalachian life was conveyed in Georgia-native Sidney Lanier's 1867 novel
Tiger Lilies.

Williams's second historical period, spanning 1880 to 1930, was dominated by the local color movement. A national literary trend that emerged during the prosperous Gilded Age, local color writing was produced across the United States by authors who, recognizing that readers craved stories about culturally distinctive places, set their fictional works in specific
American regions. Two prominent local color authors, Mary Noailles Murfree and John Fox Jr., specialized in stories situated in Appalachia. Born into a prominent central Tennessee family, Murfree based much of her fiction on the people she witnessed during visits to her family's summer home in Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau. Hiding her gender by using the nom de plume Charles Egbert Craddock, Murfree published more than two dozen books, most notably
In the Tennessee Mountains
(1878), a collection of short stories previously published in one of the leading periodicals in the United States,
The Atlantic Monthly.

Fox, a native of the Kentucky Bluegrass who moved to southwestern Virginia to oversee a family-owned coalmine operation, wrote two best-selling novels depicting life in that part of Appalachia:
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come
(1903) and
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
(1907). Murfree's and Fox's novels, as well as many less commercially successful examples of Appalachian local color writing (such as fictional works by Tennessee author Will Allen Dromgoole), were generally weakened by stilted regional dialect and exaggerated cultural representations (projecting either negative cultural condemnation or romanticized sentimentality). The inability of most local color writers to objectively render Appalachian culture was a result of those authors' role in the region: Not only were they for the most part “outsiders” unfamiliar with Appalachian “otherness,” but also, as the cultural elites of that era, they had a vested interest in the economic development of Appalachia. Although not as popular an author as Murfree or Fox, local colorist Sarah Barnwell Elliott—a lifelong resident of Appalachia known for her novel
The Durket “Sperret”
(1898)—created a more realistic regional fiction.

Between 1880 and 1930, other genres of literature were written in or about the region. The first major literary work by an African American from Appalachia, Booker T. Washington's classic autobiography
Up from Slavery
, appeared in 1901; the book described Washington's upbringing in the region just before and after the Civil War. Several early-twentieth-century nonfiction books by nonnative white authors are of ethnographic interest today because they documented Appalachian life during the rise of industrialization in the region. Among the most perceptive of these books are Emma Bell Miles's
The Spirit of the Mountains
(1905), which, despite possessing characteristics of nineteenth-century local color writing, marked the emergence of a more socially conscious regional literature; Horace Kephart's
Our Southern Highlanders
(1913), which offered a vivid if controversial portrayal of life in the Great Smokies before that area's residents were displaced by Great Smoky Mountains National Park; and John C. Campbell's
The Southern Highlander and His Homeland
(1921), which comprehensively chronicled World War I-era Appalachian social life. A widely loved poem about
the region from that period, “The Mountain Whippoorwill” (1925), was composed by nonnative author Stephen Vincent Benet.

Whereas most well-known works from the previous two periods in Appalachian literary history were written by nonnatives, during Williams's third historical period (1930–60), many respected novels were from native authors, including Thomas Wolfe, James Still, Jesse Stuart, and Harriette Arnow; readers across the nation embraced such novels with Appalachian settings and themes as Wolfe's
Look Homeward, Angel
(1929), Still's
River of Earth
(1940), Stuart's
Taps for Private Tussie
(1943), and Arnow's
The Dollmaker
(1954). In general, such fictional works were much more realistic—their authors more keenly familiar with the subtleties of regional culture—than the local color writing of the previous historical period. The socioeconomic impact of industrialization on Appalachian people was the primary theme of several novels written in this period, including Grace Lumpkin's
To Make My Bread
(1932), Henry Harrison Kroll's
Darker Grows the Valley
(1947), Janice Holt Giles's
The Enduring Hills
(1950), and Borden Deal's
Dunbar's Cove
(1958). The short story, a literary genre previously associated with the local color movement, reappeared with heightened vitality in this period, as such authors as Still, Mildred Haun, and Sherwood Anderson published short stories concerned with regional life in nationally distributed periodicals and book collections.

Nonfiction books written by Appalachian authors between 1930 and 1960—especially James Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941), Stuart's
The Thread That Runs So True
(1949), and Jean Ritchie's
Singing Family of the Cumberlands
(1955)—eventually attracted readers from across the United States. Three other works of nonfiction offered objectively rendered yet insightful portrayals of specific Appalachian places: Muriel Earley Sheppard's
Cabins in the Laurel
(1935); Donald Davidson's two-volume
The Tennessee
(1946, 1948), a history of the Tennessee River Valley; and Wilma Dykeman's
The French Broad
(1955).

Also emerging between 1930 and 1960 was a regionally distinctive poetry by such native authors as Stuart, Still, Don West, Byron Herbert Reece, Louise McNeill, and George Scarbrough. In general, poets from Appalachia rejected the high modernist aesthetics of abstraction and indirection and instead used simple, dialect-inspired language; emotional directness; and, often, traditional prosody (in terms of meter and stanzaic form). No doubt influenced by regional storytelling and ballad traditions, this generation of Appalachian poets placed greater emphasis on narrative than did most of their contemporaries outside the region; indeed, some of the most talented poets from Appalachia have also been acclaimed fiction writers (Still and Stuart from this period and, in later decades, Fred Chappell and Robert Morgan).