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(January 24, 1850–July 31, 1922)

The daughter of Fanny Priscilla Dickinson Murfree, who inherited plantations in Tennessee and Mississippi, and William Law Murfree, a successful attorney and published writer, Mary Noailles Murfree was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a town named for her great-grandfather.

Although a childhood illness had left her lame from the age of four, she enjoyed spending summers in the Cumberland Mountains, at her family's cottage in Beersheba Springs. There, she and her elder sister, Fanny, observed the place and met the mountain people who became the subjects of her local color fiction.

After the family moved to Nashville in 1857, Murfree attended the Nashville Female Academy. She completed her education in a Philadelphia boarding school.

Murfree began to write in the 1870s, with encouragement from her father. Using the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, she published her first important story, “The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove” in the
Atlantic Monthly
(May 1878). After her initial success, she signed a number of stories and novels with her male pseudonym. Her first novel,
Where the Battle was Fought
, focuses on the Civil War, an event that drastically affected her family, as their home was destroyed.

Murfree is best known for her contributions to local color fiction about Tennessee mountaineers. After publishing her first collection of short stories,
In the Tennessee Mountains
, she received widespread, favorable reviews and soon thereafter achieved national attention when she revealed her identity. Her literary reputation rests on her work from the 1880s. Her later fiction followed popular trends toward historical romances.

Popular as a lecturer, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of the South during the last year of her life.

The following scenes, excerpted from
In the Tennessee Mountains
, offer examples of some typical features of local color fiction: dense dialect, humor, and descriptions of natural landscapes that use flowery diction and allusions to classical literature.

Novels:
The Erskine Honeymoon
(published posthumously in the
Nashville Banner
, December 29, 1930–March 3, 1931),
The Story of Duciehurst; A Tale of the Mississippi
(1914),
The Ordeal; A Mountain Romance of Tennessee
(1912),
The Fair Mississippian
(1908),
The Windfall
(1907),
The Amulet
(1906),
The Storm Centre
(1905),
The Frontiersmen
(1904),
The Spectre of Power
(1903),
The Story of Old Fort Loudon
(1899),
The Juggler
(1897),
The “Stranger People's” Country
(1891),
His Vanished Star
(1894),
The Despot of Broomsedge Cove
(1888),
In the Clouds
(1886),
The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains
(1885),
Where the Battle Was Fought
(1884).
Short stories:
The Raid of the Guerilla and Other Stories
(1912),
The Bushwhackers and Other Stories
(1897),
The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge and Other Stories
(1895),
The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories
(1895),
In the Tennessee Mountains
(1884).
Books for children:
The Champion
(1902),
The Young Mountaineers
(1897),
The Story of Keedon Bluffs
(1887),
Down the Ravine
(1885).

Richard Cary,
Mary N. Murfree
(1967). Allison R. Ensor, “What is the Place of Mary Noailles Murfree Today?”
Tennessee Historical Quarterly
47:4 (winter 1988), 198–205. Edd Winfield Parks,
Charles Egbert Craddock
(1941). Nathalia Wright, “Introduction,”
In the Tennessee Mountains
(1970), 5–33.

from Drifting Down Lost Creek

“Laws-a-me!” she cried, in shrill, toothless glee; “ef hyar ain't 'Vander Price! What brung ye down hyar along o' we-uns, 'Vander?” she continued, with simulated anxiety. “Hev that thar red heifer o' our'n lept over the fence agin, an' got inter Pete's corn? Waal, sir, ef she ain't the headin'est heifer!”

“I hain't seen none o' yer heifer, ez I knows on,” replied the young blacksmith, with gruff, drawling deprecation. Then he tried to regain his natural manner. “I kem down hyar,” he remarked in an off-hand way, “ter git a drink o' water.” He glanced furtively at the girl; then looked quickly away at the gallant redbird, still gayly parading among the leaves.

The old woman grinned with delight. “Now, ef that ain't s'prisin',” she declared. “Ef we hed knowed ez Lost Creek war a-goin' dry over yander a-nigh the shop, so ye an' Pete would hev ter kem hyar thirstin' fur water, we-uns would hev brung su'thin' down hyar ter drink out'n. We-uns hain't got no gourd hyar, hev we, Cynthy?”

“'Thout it air the little gourd with the saft soap in it,” said Cynthia, confused and blushing.

Her mother broke into a high, loud laugh. “Ye ain't wantin' ter gin 'Vander the soapgourd ter drink out'n Cynthy! Leastwise, I ain't goin' ter gin it ter Pete. Fur I s'pose ef ye hev ter kem a haffen mile ter git a drink, 'Vander, ez surely Pete'll hev ter kem, too. Waal, waal, who would hev b'lieved ez Lost Creek would go dry nigh the shop, an' yit be a-scuttlin' along like that, hyar-abouts!” and she pointed with her bony finger at the swift flow of the water.

He was forced to abandon his clumsy pretense of thirst. “Lost Creek ain't gone dry nowhar, ez I knows on,” he admitted, mechanically rolling the sleeve of his hammer-arm up and down as he talked. “It air toler'ble high,—, higher'n I ever see it afore….

…

It was a great opportunity for old Dr. Patton, who lived six miles down the valley, and zealously he improved it. He often felt that in this healthful country, where he has born, and where bucolic taste and local attachment still kept him, he was rather a medical theorist than a medical practitioner, so few and slight were the demands upon the resources of his science. He was as one who has long pondered the unsuggestive details of the map of a region, and who suddenly sees before him its glowing, vivid landscape.

“A beautiful fracture!” he protested with rapture,—“a beautiful fracture!”

Through all the countryside were circulated his cheerful accounts of patients who had survived fracture of the skull. Among the simple mountaineers his learned talk of the trephine gave rise to the startling report that he intended to put a linchpin into Jubal Tyne's head. It was rumored, too, that the unfortunate man's brains had “in an' about leaked haffen out;” and many freely prompted Providence by the suggestion that “ef Jube war ready ter die it war high time he war taken,” as, having been known as a hasty and choleric man, it was predicted that he would “make a most survigrus idjit.”

“Cur'ous enough ter me ter find out ez Jube ever hed brains,” commented Mrs. Ware. “'T war well enough ter let some of 'em leak out ter prove it. He hev never showed he hed brains no other way, ez I knows on. Now,” she added, “somebody oughter tap 'Vander's head, an' mebbe they'll find him pervided, too. Wonders will never cease! Nobody would hev accused Jube o' sech. Folks'll hev ter respec' them brains. 'Vander done him that favior in splitting his head open.”

…

…A vague prescience of dawn was on the landscape; dim and spectral, it stood but half revealed in the doubtful light. The stars were gone; ever the sidereal outline of the great Scorpio had crept away. But the gibbous moon still swung above the dark and melancholy forests of Pine Mountain, and its golden chalice spilled a dreamy glamour all adown the lustrous mists in Lost Creek Valley. Ever and anon the crags reverberated with the shrill clamor of a watch-dog at a cabin in the Cove; for there was an unwonted stir upon the mountain's brink.

(March 19, 1946–)

Having grown up in Morehead, Kentucky, in the 1950s, where her mother taught at the county high school and her father taught at Morehead State College (now a university), Elaine Fowler Palencia recalls receiving very little emphasis on Appalachia in her formal education. When she was sixteen, her family moved to Cookeville, Tennessee. She graduated from Vanderbilt University, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in 1968, where she studied English literature with Allen Tate.

She lives in Champaign, Illinois, with her husband, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Illinois, and her son, who attends special education classes. Their daughter is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri. Palencia has taught creative writing at Illinois Wesleyan University and lectured at a number of universities and writers' conferences. She currently works as a freelance writer and editor and as a YMCA aerobics instructor.

She wrote her first story in Spanish, while spending a summer in Colombia with her husband, whose home is in the Andes. But since she became serious about writing fiction, she has written in English spoken by Appalachian characters. Her father's stories of his childhood on farms in West Virginia, on Spurlock Creek and Nine Mile Hollow, provide important background for her fiction.

Equally important, she says, are her Aunt Glenith's stories of leaving the hills (and Brierhoppers) for Ohio cities. She explains, “The main theme of my writing is exile and return: the search for home. It arises from my journey away from eastern Kentucky—first to central Tennessee, then Germany, Boston, Detroit, Colombia, and to end up in the flat Midwest. My sense of story comes from the narrative, anecdotal speech of my Appalachian friends and relatives. I owe my entire writing career to having grown up in the region. Every story I write is a letter to the place I came from.”

Palencia has received awards for her fiction and poetry from the Appalachian Writers Association, the Illinois Arts Council,
Iowa Woman, Willow Review, Appalachian Heritage
, the Kentucky State Poetry Society, and the American Association of University Women. Her poem “Emily Dickinson's Bodyguard Speaks,” published in
River King Poetry Supplement
, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has written two poetry chapbooks about her son,
Taking the Train
and
The Dailiness of It.
Under the pseudonym of Laurel Blake, she is also the author of several mass-market romance novels, earning recognition as a finalist for the Golden Medallion Award of the Romance Writers of America.

The author's Aunt Glenith and Uncle Carl inspired the characters of Dreama and Floyd McDonald in
Small Caucasian Woman
, a critically acclaimed collection of interrelated short stories set in an eastern Kentucky town (based on Morehead) and tracing the lives of Appalachian people who migrate to northern industrial cities. They reappear, along with other characters and places in
Brier Country
, her second collection of Appalachian short fiction.

Short stories:
Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley
(2000),
Small Caucasian Woman
(1993),
Heart on Holiday
(1980).
Poetry:
The Dailiness of It
(2002),
Taking the Train
(1997).
Autobiographical essay:
“Leaving Pre–Appalachia,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 201–8.

Pat Arnow, review of
Small Caucasian Woman, Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine
10:3 (fall 1993). Joyce Dyer, “Elaine Fowler Palencia,” in
Bloodroot
, 200. Art Jester, “Morehead Native Writes and Dreams About Kentucky,”
Lexington Herald-Leader
(15 August 1993), E4. Marianne Worthington, review of
Brier Country, Appalachian Heritage
28:2 (spring 2000), 66–70.