Jim Wayne Miller

Reared in western North Carolina on a farm in Buncombe County near his maternal and paternal grandparents, Jim Wayne Miller completed his undergraduate work at Berea College in 1958 and earned his doctorate in German literature at Vanderbilt University in 1965. Throughout his professional life, he taught German at Western Kentucky University....

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 ...

Jesse Stuart

Jesse Stuart was born in northeastern Kentucky’s Greenup County. His parents, hard-working tenant farmers, instilled in him and his four siblings a drive for education, a poignant emphasis given his father’s illiteracy and his mother’s second-grade education. Stuart graduated from Lincoln Memorial University with a BA in 1929, making friends while there with Don West and James Still. At Vanderbilt University, where he attended graduate school in 1931–1932, Stuart studied with influential southern writers and critics such as Donald Davidson, who also taught Appalachian authors Mildred Haun and Jim Wayne Miller. After graduate school, Stuart returned to Greenup to work as an educator and author....

Jim Wayne and Anson

This chapter tracks Still’s relationship with his friend, fellow writer, travel companion, and unofficial agent, Jim Wayne Miller. With Miller’s help in the 1980s, Still published four books with three different presses. He also worked on the Foxfire project with Eliot Wigginton and was writing the Texas manuscript, which led him to assume the name of his character Anson Winters when corresponding with Miller.