As a follow-up to my recent article on Jesse Stuart’s family during World War II, I offer this article about two of Stuart’s books that were republished as Armed Services Editions during the war. Although Lieutenant Jesse Stuart never served overseas, two of his [...]
In 1985, I moved to Ashland to assume the executive and literary leadership of the Jesse Stuart Foundation, an organization that had been created in 1979, five years before Stuart’s death, to manage his literary estate. With assistance from hundreds of people, including Keith [...]
Eighty-three years ago, on December 7, 1941, Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor plunged America into a global conflict that had been underway for a little more than two years. Early the following year, Jesse Stuart, nearly 36 with a pregnant wife, tried to enlist [...]
In his 1956 autobiography, “The Year of My Rebirth,” Jesse Stuart makes brief mention of the mid-nineteenth century murder of “Nick” Nickapopolis, a pack peddler who worked W-Hollow on a monthly basis in the 1850s. Little is known of “Nick”—the people of W-Hollow did [...]
Dear Friends of the JSF: Hurricane Helene left an enormous path of destruction across the southern states. One of the hardest hit areas was Asheville, NC. JSF friend and editor Carol Boggess and her husband Sam live on a mountain farm north of Asheville. [...]
Best known for his nonfiction work “Night Comes to the Cumberlands,” Harry M. Caudill also wrote fiction, including “Dark Hills to Westward: The Saga of Jenny Wiley,” first published in 1969 and recently reprinted in a new softback edition by the Jesse Stuart Foundation.When Jenny [...]
In the 1800s and early 1900s, waves of immigrants came to American cities to escape famine or persecution in their home countries. On New York’s Lower East Side, mostly Irish and Italians were packed into airless, crowded tenements or makeshift shelters, where they lived in [...]
Cynthia Rylant is an author of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry for children and young adults as well as an author and author/illustrator of picture books for children. Rylant is a prolific author who often bases her works on her childhood in the West Virginia [...]
For more than four years, I have been working on a collection of essays about the depression decade in eastern Kentucky. That work has intensified my interest in Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. With a presidential election imminent, I thought my readers [...]
Education was a calling for Jesse Stuart. In his books he portrays the teacher as a devoted nurturer, an advocate, and a liberator, rescuing children and their families from decline, illiteracy, social decay, or economic instability. “We educate our people or we perish,” he often [...]
