Reviewed by: James Still: A Life by Carol Boggess Chris Green (bio) James Still: A Life. By Carol Boggess. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. Pp. 534. $40.00 cloth; $40.00 e-book) For scholars, writers, and readers of Appalachian literature, James Still has been a defining but often enigmatic presence. Carol Boggess's James Still: A Life clarifies Still's path and helps us know the person behind his later public persona. The book joins biographies of and scholarship about his contemporaries, such as Don West, Jesse Stuart, and Harriette Simpson Arnow, to help sketch out their varied but interconnected cultural and literary landscapes. Broken into six parts, Boggess looks carefully into Still's boyhood in eastern Alabama; his college years and nascent writing at Lincoln Memorial University; his search for work, connection to Hindman Settlement School, and the national publication of his first three books; his deployment to Africa during WWII; his reemergence into the regional literary world with the re-publication of two of his books; and his rise to prominence during the growth of Appalachian studies in the last part of his life during which he published seventeen books. Boggess braids together five main topics: Still's relationship to his family and friends; his relationship to place and work; his relationship to being a writer and literary networks; his romantic relationships (or lack thereof) with women; and how he managed his outward persona versus his private world. In the process, Boggess reveals the nuances of Still's complex, quiet, and at times touchy personality. At its best, the book provides rich details that hinge on personal relationships, portrayals of which draw extensively on interviews and letters. In the process, we learn that Still was an independent and private person and a writer with a dedicated intensity of observation and exactness of craft. While he often lacked family connections or broke off connections with others in the literary world, he was hungry to be known on his terms (pp. 239, 304–18). For instance, Boggess illuminates Still's personality and his relationship to how he wanted to be seen as she explores how three men who promoted Still and his work (Dean Cadle, Albert Stewart, and [End Page 637] Jim Wayne Miller) had push-pull relationships with him. At the same time, Boggess shows that Still had a handful of quiet, sustaining relationships both in letter (with literary connections and a few students) and in person with what can be thought of as his Knott County adoptive families, the Amburgeys in his early years and later the Perrys. Boggess offers poignant details and touching insight about Still as she explores certain relationships, such as with Iris Grannis, a professor from Lincoln Memorial University, or Guy Loomis, Still's benefactor. However, other relationships need much more careful exploration because of their historical significance, including Still's relationship to Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, the importance of whose "long-lasting" friendships are mentioned more than once, but on whom less than a paragraph is written (e.g., p. 304). In other cases, Boggess goes overboard, such as when she spends nine pages exploring Still's failed, semi-romantic relationship with a woman (pp. 170–78). By such minimization and emphasis, Boggess seems to be making a point, although it is hard to discern exactly what. Similarly, Boggess regularly shares extended parts of Still's journals, such as his notes about shipboard life when he was deployed to Africa, but the significance of such lengthy entries are under-explored (pp. 189–91). Boggess faithfully reports on important literary and social contacts that defined Still's later career and developing reputation. We learn details about Still's work at Morehead State, his role in the Appalachian Writers Workshop, his connection with Jim Wayne Miller, and the results of connections at Berea College. However, although the evolution of Still's post–1950 writing life resulted directly from the networks around the bourgeoning Appalachian Literary Renaissance and Appalachian Studies movement, Boggess does not provide such context, with little citation of scholarly work on those topics. One might say that Boggess offers detailed renditions of the trees through which Still moved, but shares...