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An Overview of Appalachian Literature by George Brosi Appalachian literature begins with the stories told by those who first settled our region. The stories of the Cherokees, as well as those brought to America from Europe and Africa, form a rich tradition that not only propelled Appalachian literature to an auspicious beginning but that continue to infuse regional writing. The literature of Europeans who immigrated and settled into these mountains began with travel accounts and then fiction by visitors to the area. Among the first Appalachian authors in the pre–Civil War era was David Hunter Strother (1816–88) of Martinsburg, Virginia, now West Virginia, who wrote under the pen name “Porte Crayon.” At about that same time, Hardin Taliaferro of Surry County, North Carolina, was transcribing the oral traditions of the European settlers in the region in his book Fisher’s River Scenes and Characters (1859). George Washington Harris (1814–69) of Knoxville, Tennessee, published Sut Lovingood’s Yarns in 1867. In their important essay introducing the “Literature” section of The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, Grace Toney Edwards and Theresa Lloyd call Harris’s character, Sut Lovingood, “an archetypal hillbilly trickster, akin to the medieval fool in his ability to mock the foibles of polite society.” The Civil War was catastrophic to this region, resulting in a breakdown of law and order and sometimes pitting kinfolks against each other. The aftermath of the war was particularly devastating to the region, partly because many mountain areas followed their war allegiances and voted Republican in traditionally Democratic states, thus positioning themselves poorly for infrastructure improvements, including public spending on education. For more than fifty years after the Civil War, practically no books by people born and raised in the region were published. Nevertheless, in the 1880s, outsiders put Appalachia in the forefront of the local color movement in American literature. Mary Noailles Murfree (1850–1922) of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was a sickly lady who spent months at Beersheba Springs and Montvale Springs, spas up in the mountains not far from her Middle Tennessee home. She created many archetypal mountain xviii An Overview of Appalachian Literature characters who have been found in regional literature ever since, including the cranky crone, the flirtatious fiddler, and the patronizing preacher. Her motifs, including the romance between the mountaineer and the outsider, have also become standards. At the turn of the century, when the local color movement began to fade—superseded by literary romanticism—John Fox, Jr. (1862–1919), kept the region in the limelight. He had grown up in the Kentucky bluegrass, but his brother was in the coal business in the mountains, and Fox followed him there, setting his novels, including his huge best sellers, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), in the mountains. Eventually, he settled in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Lucy Furman (1869–1958) was another popular writer who came to Appalachia from outside—in her case western Kentucky—but lived at the Hindman Settlement School in eastern Kentucky for seventeen years. Her best-known novel, The Quare Women (1923), took its name from the designation that some local people gave to the missionaries from outside who taught their children at school. One can draw an interesting parallel between the literary history of the region and its economic history, which was very early dominated by the hospitality industry for lowlanders, like Mary Noailles Murfree, and then by extractive industries, which led John Fox, Jr., to the area. The establishment of charitable organizations, like the Hindman Settlement School, which drew Lucy Furman to the area, was a subsequent economic development. An important transition took place in the 1910s and 1920s, led by two fascinating feminists who, though outsiders, identified closely with the local people. At the age of fourteen, Olive Tilford Dargan (1869–1968) taught at a one-room school where she was responsible for forty students ranging in age from six to twenty. She won a scholarship to Peabody College by earning the highest score in the state of Arkansas on a competitive examination. While in Nashville, she traveled with schoolmates to the North Carolina mountains and vowed, “If I ever own a home of my own, it will be in these mountains.” Her first published works were dramas written in verse, and in 1906 she realized her dream and moved to a farm in Swain County, North Carolina. She published three proletarian novels in the 1930s under the pen name “Fielding Burke.”When she...

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