Twenty-First-Century Appalachian Literature

Although Appalachia and its authors resist political definition and economic category, one can say that twenty-first century Appalachian writers attempt to define what changes and what endures in a rapidly globalizing world. As Pulitzer Prize finalist Maurice Manning has noted, at the core of Appalachian literature is a tension between an appreciation of the region and an “anxiety for legitimacy”; this observation reflects the challenges facing authors from a region still often seen as “other” by the broader American culture. Some contemporary Appalachian authors explore which traditions are worth preserving and which ones should fall by the wayside, while others consider how to preserve and expand their Appalachian identity, a process that they sometimes connect with preservation and innovation in literary style. In short, many twentieth-century Appalachian authors cultivate in their readers an appreciation of Appalachian perspectives from a self-aware otherness that is sometimes tradition tethered yet is willing to go far beyond received notions about the region.

Breece D’J Pancake

Although Breece D’J Pancake published only a handful of short stories during his brief life, their mastery has secured him a high ranking in Appalachian literature. Born and reared in Milton, West Virginia, Pancake completed his BA degree in English education at Marshall University in 1974. He taught at two military high schools, Fort Union and Staunton, before studying creative writing at the University of Virginia. Pancake felt culturally at odds with the university’s traditionally elite student body, and while there, he cultivated a “mountain man” persona. (In truth, Pancake did enjoy hunting and fishing throughout his life.) Pancake’s unusual middle name was the result of a printer’s error at the ...

James Still

Many people are surprised to learn that James Still was not a native of eastern Kentucky but of central Alabama, for his name has become synonymous with Appalachian literature. Many of his short stories and poems as well as his novel River of Earth (1940) are set in Knott County, Kentucky, where he worked at the Hindman School and lived for almost all of his adult life. Still’s work delves deeply into the lives of people and communities in one corner of Appalachia but simultaneously speaks to experiences in rural places and small towns everywhere. His writing also explores nature and the individual’s relationship to it....

Early Appalachian Literature

The texts collected here describe late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Appalachia as a geographical and political frontier and include Cherokee narratives, works by pioneers and frontiersmen and Native Americans who assimilated into European culture, revealing how this borderland became a cultural, rhetorical, and mythical frontier. The selections also include Enlightenment, Euro-American views of Appalachia from men such as Thomas Jefferson and William Bartram.

Loyal Jones

Loyal Jones was born near the Great Smoky Mountains in Cherokee County, North Carolina, and was reared there and in nearby Clay County. After earning degrees from Berea College (1954) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1961), he spent five years directing the Council of the Southern Mountains, a community development organization. From 1970 to 1993 he directed Berea’s Appalachian Center, which is named in his honor. Jones helped shape Appalachian literature in the 1960s by advocating for the publication of Appalachian authors such as Gurney Norman and Jim Wayne Miller in the council’s periodical ...

Fred Chappell

Poet, fiction writer, essayist, and educator Fred Chappell was reared on his grandparents’ farm in Canton, North Carolina. He began writing poems when he was fifteen. While attending Duke University (receiving his AB in 1961 and his MA in 1964), he became friends with southern writers Reynolds Price, Anne Tyler, and James Applewhite. Chappell taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro from 1964 until 2004 and was poet laureate of North Carolina from 1997 until 2002. Although claimed by the southern literary canon, Chappell considers himself an Appalachian author, believing that Appalachian literature is distinct from its southern cousin....

Writing Appalachia

From the earliest oral traditions to print accounts of frontier exploration, from local color to modernism and postmodernism, from an exuberant flowering in the 1970s to its high popular and critical profile in the twenty-first century, Appalachian literature can boast a long tradition of delighting and provoking readers. Yet, locating an anthology that offers a representative selection of authors and texts from the earliest days to the present can be difficult. Katherine Ledford and Theresa Lloyd have produced an anthology to meet this need. Simultaneously representing, complicating, and furthering the discourse on the Appalachian region and its cultures, this anthology works to provides the historical depth and range of Appalachian literature that contemporary readers and scholars seek, from Cherokee oral narratives to fiction and drama about mountaintop removal and prescription drug abuse. It also aims to challenge the common stereotypes of Appalachian life and values by including stories of multiple, often less heard, viewpoints of Appalachian life: mountain and valley, rural and urban, folkloric and postmodern, traditional and contemporary, Northern and Southern, white people and people of color, straight and gay, insiders and outsiders—though, on some level, these dualisms are less concrete than previously imagined.

The Appalachian Renaissance

In Appalachian literature, the 1960s through the 1990s saw a creative explosion that is sometimes referred to as the Appalachian Renaissance. Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-fiction, and Drama all experienced growth, attention, and flourishing during this period. Appalachian Renaissance authors in all genres display a greater diversity than previously represented in the region’s literature. This section is broken into four subsections, one for each genre.

Jeff Mann

Jeff Mann chafes against a world that would pigeonhole people into mutually exclusive categories. Mann was born in Clifton Forge, Virginia, and reared in Covington, Virginia, and Hinton, West Virginia. He earned undergraduate degrees in English and forestry, along with an MA in English, from West Virginia University. Mann lived briefly in Washington, DC, and since 1989 has taught Appalachian literature, LGBTQ literature, and creative writing at Virginia Tech....

Modernism in Appalachian Literature

Regional or ethnic modernists maintained a focus on history—especially community history—and wrote about rural, regional, or ethnic cultures. Although some regional modernists experimented with literary style, among the Appalachian modernists literary experimentation tends to be subtle. Regional modernists differed in their response to the urban/rural divide and often found themselves wrestling with issues of cultural representation. Like mainstream modernism, there was pushback against the romanticism of the previous era, but the response of Appalachian modernists is a specific reaction to the tradition of nineteenth-century travel and local color writing in which mountain culture had been misrepresented at worst and sugar coated by sympathetic intermediaries at best.