Appalachian Fiction

Appalachian Fiction

Mid-Appalachian Region
Authors
Novels
Stories

What is Appalachian fiction? What makes it unique?
Wendell Berry throws out some suggestions in his short piece, The Long Legged House:

“As I worked that summer I had these lines of [Andrew] Marvell very fresh in my mind, and they were having a deeper influence on me than I knew. My problem as a writer, though I clearly didn’t know it yet, was that I had inherited a region that had as a literary tradition only the corrupt and crippling local colorism of the “Kentucky” writers. This was both a mythologizing chauvinism and a sort of literary imperialism, tirelessly exploiting the cliches of rural landscapes, picking and singing and fighting lazy hillbillies and Bluegrass Colonels. That is a blinding and tongue-tied inheritance for a young writer. And one doesn’t even have to read the books to get it; it is so thoroughly established and accredited by schoolteachers, politicians, official bulletins, postcards, and the public at large...” (p. 138).

In Taps for Private Tussie, Jesse Stuart shows how the landscape of Appalachia can inspire a young (and uneducated) Tussie to flights of poetic fancy: "In our shack trouble had started. Grandma had got so she wouldn't speak to Aunt Vittie. And Uncle Mott didn't like Uncle George, but I was like Grandpa; I loved everybody. Grandpa laughed and talked with Aunt Vittie and Uncle George same as he did with Uncle Mott, Grandma, and me. And when I went to school a-carryin my baked taters and rabbit, I wondered what would happen when rabbit season was over and Uncle Mott couldn't find any more taters. I wondered if there would be any more trouble at our house."

"Then I would look at the thick timber on the place that Grandpa owned that bordered my path. I thought the tall gray limbless poplar trees looked like frozen-stiff possum tails a-standin in the frosty air; the gray, bushy hazelnut bushes looked like gray squirrel tails when they ran away from me a-barkin, to the tall red oaks with hollow knots upon them, where they ran to hide; the red sumacs with their pods of berries looked like roosters' red combs. And the dark bushy pine tops, after the sun had gone down, looked like the black bushy polecat tails. The greenbriar clusters looked like piles of little green snakes wrapped around one another and the brown saw briers looked like piles of little brown ground snakes. And I could see dogs, mules, schoolhouses, trees and big mountains with deep gulleys streaked down their sides among the white clouds that rolled across the sky over these mountains. When I saw those things I'd forget the trouble at our shack. And I was larnin to read so that I could read many books." {p. 229)

Will Stein

Washington County Public Library

5/27/2014

Anna Blydenburgh

Washington County Public Library

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English

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