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]ESSE STUART One of Kentucky's most prolific and cherished writers, Jesse Stuart was born in 1906 in Greenup County. He was educated at Greenup County High School and taught there after earning a college degree at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee . In the following years Stuart also served as high school principal and county school superintendent, experiences that formed the basis of one of his most wellknown books, The Thread that Runs So True (1949). Stuart's first book, a collection of poems titled Man With a Bull Tongue Plow, was published in 1934 and was followed two years later by his first collection ofshort stories, Head o'W-Hollow. His early autobiography, BeyondDark Hills, appeared in 1938, and his first novel, Trees ofHeaven, in 1940. Once Stuart began to succeed financially as a writer, he devoted himself full time to writing, though he intermittently returned to teaching in the following two decades and served as a guest lecturer at various colleges and universities . He completed his final book, The Kingdom Within: A SpiritualAutobiography, in 1979 following a stroke that left him virtually bedridden. He died in 1984. A natural storyteller, Stuart published more than four hundred stories and nearly sixty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, many of which are kept in print by the Jesse Stuart Foundation in Ashland, Kentucky. His contribution to the popularity and growth of the American short story at mid-century is immense. In recent times, though, the critical attention to his short fiction has waned, but readers throughout the country remain drawn to his subjects and themes, especially his portrayal of rural values and love of the natural world. The majority of his most popular stories appeared in the 1930s and mid 1940s. "Lost Land ofYouth," though a later story and seldom reprinted, is a good example ofhis work in the genre. First published in 1950, the story portrays an individual's return home and the unsettling encounter with the heritage he has foresaken. • Bert mused on his own fate as he drove along, looking at the old tobacco barns filled with bright burley. He observed the tobacco stubble on the rugged slopes and the little creek bottoms. These were the same places tobacco grew when he was a boy. But the valley had changed. The giant timber was replaced by second growth on the LosT LANo oF YoUTH 59 rugged slopes not suited for tobacco. He could remember, and he could see it from the photographs ofmemory, the long trains ofmule teams going down the old Lost Creek road with two and three hogsheads oftobacco on each jolt wagon, pulled by two husky mule teams, on its way to the Hopewell railway station, where it was shipped on this branch-line railroad to warehouses. Now, the railroad was gone. This had happened, as so many other things, in his lifetime. He had seen giant virgin yellow-poplars, sixty feet long, pulled down the Lost Creek road with twelve yoke of oxen. Now, the second-growth logs were trucked away to the mills as the tobacco was trucked away to the warehouses. Bert remembered in his youth that Lost Creek was a little world of its own. There were two churches and two schools. There was one big store. It was a general merchandise store that kept a little bit of everything: hardware, groceries, seeds, feeds and clothes. It kept everything the Lost Creek people had to have. It was a dosed-in world too, due to the roads. It took a man one day to get to Blakesburg by train and one day to return. Ifhe rode horseback it took him four days. Now, Bert had driven in his new automobile from Blakesburg to Lost Creek in thirty minutes. Lost Creek was no longer the little dosed-in world he had known in his youth. It was as open as an autumn leaf in the wind to the outside world. A man could even live on Lost Creek now and have his business in Blakesburg. As Bert drove along observing the wind-ruffiing shimmer ofgolden leaf-douds slanting upward from the valley toward the bright October skies, he remembered how he had planned to marry Mollie. He had picked out a little farm with more creek bottoms than any other farm on Lost Creek. He had planned to grow more and better burley than any Lost Creek farmer. He was driving past the farm he had chosen now. From the road...

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