Books About Appalachia

Abstract

Books About Appalachia A truly great book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious & marvelous, ambrosial & fertile, as a fungus or a lichen. — Thoreau C^ The university presses within the Appalachian region provide a valuable service by printing worthwhile books often unappealing to the money-minded larger national publishers. They also issue publications not strictly within the confines of conventional scholarly works once more or less associated with the university presses. Some have re-issued needed but out-ofprint books, both fiction, non-fiction, and studies of various aspects of the region. The University Press of Kentucky at Lexington and The University of Tennessee Press at Knoxville have been especially active in issuing numerous region-related books. Below are brief reviews of some books issued by these presses. They will be glad to send brochures of their publications for the asking. THREE FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY WELCOME THE TRAVELER HOME Jim Garland's Story o/ the Kentucky Mountains Edited by Julia S. Ardery, Foreword by Thomas hl. Bethell 256 pages $23.00 GENERATIONS An American Family by John Egerton 272 pages PASTTITANROCK Journeys into an Appalachian Valley by Ellesa Clay High 192 pages $19.50 $16.00 These three books have a good deal in common: they are social histories covering, for the most part, similar periods in time (roughly pioneer days to the present), they deal with the people of the mountains of eastern Kentucky and make use of the techniques of oral history. Beyond that there considerable differences and individuality. Jim Garland was born at Fourmile in southeastern Kentucky in 1905. It was then, as Thomas N. Bethell states in his Foreword, "a quiet place in a quiet time poised on the edge of permanent disruption. Great changes were beginning to sweep across the mountains." At the age of thirteen, rather than preparing for college as he had hoped, Jim Garland was forced to go to work in the mines. For fourteen years he experienced the hardships, disasters, and dangers of mining and attempts at unionization that is now a part of the record of the 1920s and early 1930s. He was an active worker for the communist-backed NMU, and he wrote and sang protest songs. Forced to leave the mountains in the 30s, he went to New York and had his own radio show of mountain music and protest songs. He recorded for the National Archives but never returned to the mountains except for brief visits to record folk material for the Archives and Folkways Records, and later to conduct interviews to update the material of his book, much of which he had set down during the winter of 1967. During World War II he moved with his family to Washington state to work in the shipyards. Afterward he established his own broom and mop factory, employing the blind and handicapped. After twenty-one years he sold out and "joined the retired." It was there on Washington 's Pacific Coast that he began to set down his story "before nature stopped me from remembering." 73 Editor Julia S. Ardery explains Garland's major intention in Welcome The Traveler Home as "to chart the waves of social upheaval across two hundred years in the mountains (white men's settlements, the building of an agrarian society, the subsequent concentration of land holdings, the influx of small-scale industrialists, the mountain's usurpation by outside, money-minded technocracy) and to narrate a coeval family history, his own, showing how mountain people met these changes." This is his story, the story of a generous working man who wanted to change things, to make the world better. Jim Garland did not live to complete his story, but here it is ably edited by Julia S. Ardery with a very perceptive Foreword by Thomas N. Bethell. Generations traces the family line ofone family from an emigrant from northern England born in 1724 through sojourns in Virginia, North Carolina, and Harlan County , Kentucky, to the present members of that family now living in Garrard County, Kentucky. For his projected history, John Egerton sought a "representative" middle class family—one that could stand "as a metaphor for America." He found that...