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Elizabeth Madox Roberts 289 Jesse Stuart from The Thread That Runs So True Jesse Stuart was the first Kentucky writer I ever met in person. It was in the early 1960s, and I was a young assistant professor of English at the University of Florida. The head of the department had asked me to drive to the airport to pick up Jesse Stuart, who was scheduled to speak to our students. I was nervous about the prospect of being in a car for as much as an hour with a world-famous author. I should not have worried. Within ten minutes of our meeting, we were calling each other by our first names and sharing stories. When I moved to Kentucky a year later, I got to know Stuart and his wife, Naomi Deane, and, later, their grown daughter, Jane, also a writer. I visited them many times at their home at W-Hollow, where Stuart was born in 1907, in Greenup County in northeastern Kentucky. It was a friendship that I cherish. Jesse Stuart was not only Kentucky’s most prolific major author, with more than fifty books to his credit, but also Kentucky’s friendliest and most generous author. Whether he was writing fiction or nonfiction or poetry, his subject was almost always his beloved homeland of Kentucky. Although Stuart was no sentimentalist and often wrote bitter satire, he loved the Appalachian people and their ways. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his readers considered themselves not only his literary fans but also his personal friends. Stuart was never too busy to write letters of thanks, to accept total strangers into his home, or to give words of advice and encouragement to fledgling writers. He spent so much time with his readers that it is incredible that he found time to write so many books, including Trees of Heaven (1940), Taps for Private Tussie (1943), TheThread That Runs So True (1949), and The Year of My Rebirth (1956). Jesse Stuart was very much like Op, a larger-than-life character in The Good Spirit of Laurel Ridge (1953), who he once said was based on a real person, whom he had to “tone down” to make him believable. Although his national vogue in the 1930s as America’s plowboy poet—the American Robert Burns—has waned as literary tastes have changed, Jesse Stuart has a safe niche in American literature as the author of well-crafted, authentic Appalachian fiction and autobiography. Today the Jesse Stuart Foundation, with historian and author James M. Gifford at the helm as executive-director, preserves and promotes the Stuart legacy as well as the larger Appalachian heritage and culture. The following selection from The Thread That Runs So True is a fictional rendering of Stuart’s own teaching experiences. h Monday morning when I started on my way to school, I had with me Don Conway, a pupil twenty years of age, who had never planned to enter school 289 290 The Kentucky Anthology again. I was the new teacher here at Lonesome Valley and I didn’t know what kind of brains he had. He had left school when he was in the fourth grade. But I did know that he had two good fists and that he would be on my side. All day Sunday while I had worked at the schoolhouse, I was trying to think of a plan so I could stay at Lonesome Valley School. I knew I had to stay. I knew if one had to go it would be Guy Hawkins. I might have to use my head a little but that was why I had it. It had taken a lot of persuasion to get Don Conway to return to school. He had planned to get married after his tobacco crop was sold. But I explained the value of an education to him in dollars and cents. I told him I would teach him how to measure a field and figure the number of acres, how to figure the number of bushels in a wagon bed, cornbin, and how many cubic yards of dirt one would have to remove to dig a cellar or a well. Don Conway was interested in this type of knowledge. I told him no man should be married and live on a farm unless he knew these simple things, for he could easily be cheated the rest of his days. I was interested in his learning these things all right, but I...

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