Expanding on Williams’s and Miller’s historical surveys of Appalachian literature entails acknowledging several literary trends from the last decades of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and 1980s, several authors, including West Virginians Breece D’J Pancake and Pinckney Benedict, garnered attention for their short fiction, producing short stories that were much more modernist (more minimalist and ironic and less nostalgic) than most short fiction by earlier writers from the region. Several novelists active after 1960 likewise were strongly influenced by modernist stylistic aesthetics, although their themes often were traditionally Appalachian. For example, two other West Virginia authors, Mary Lee Settle and Denise Giardina, wrote complex novels that portrayed distinctively Appalachian social milieus. Known collectively as the Beulah Quintet, Settle’s five interlinked novels traced the various historical stages—and overarching moral and philosophical significances—of British settlers becoming Appalachian residents; one of these novels (Blood Ties, 1978) was awarded the National Book Award. Giardina earned acclaim for a novel set in the coalfields, Storming Heaven (1987). A fictionalized retelling of the Battle of Blair Mountain, a historic struggle between striking pro-union coalminers and the U.S. Army in the early 1920s, Storming Heaven was told from multiple perspectives; the novel’s central consciousness was not that of any individual human being but rather that of an entire community united in a moral struggle.
The significant socioeconomic changes in Appalachia between 1960 and 2000 influenced regional literature, with fiction, for instance, increasingly emphasizing urban and suburban life, as in the work of Jayne Anne Phillips and Lisa Alther. Also, Appalachian literature more fully reflected the region’s cultural diversity. For example, several literary works written in this period brought national attention to the Native American experience in Appalachia. Previously, well-known books about Native American life in the region were either translations from the oral tradition (such as James Mooney’s 1900 classic, Myths of the Cherokee) or ethnographies. Although not written by Native Americans, two literary works—Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree (1976) and John Ehle’s Trail of Tears (1988)—sensitively interpreted Cherokee life and history. Carter’s book, chronicling one Cherokee’s boyhood, eventually became the subject of controversy: Although The Education of Little Tree initially was advertised as a “true story,” Carter was later revealed to have been Asa Carter, a white writer of 1960s- era race-baiting speeches for politician George Wallace. Marilou Awiakta, in her 1994 nonfiction book Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom, combined awareness of her own ancestral Cherokee cultural history with appreciation of the enduring value of Native American thought and belief.
The period 1960–2000 also brought new literary works reflective of recent African American experience in Appalachia. West Virginia native Henry Louis Gates Jr., a leading African American voice nationally, wrote Colored People (1994), a memoir of growing up black in Appalachia in the years immediately preceding the civil rights movement. In the 1990s, several African American writers from Appalachia, including Crystal Wilkinson and Frank X. Walker, formed the Kentucky-based Affrilachian movement to encourage literary expression of the cultural life (especially the speech and storytelling) of African Americans across the region.
Additionally, that period in Appalachian literary history fostered a body of literature concerned with the lives and perspectives of women. Some memorable novels published earlier, such as Anne Armstrong’s This Day and Time (1930) and Arnow’s The Dollmaker, featured strong female characters from Appalachia, yet many works published after 1960—from Wilma Dykeman’s 1962 novel The Tall Woman to Lee Smith’s 1988 novel Fair and Tender Ladies to Dorothy Allison’s 1992 novel Bastard Out of Carolina—explored the theme of Appalachian women enduring enormous difficulties to ensure social and economic survival for themselves and their families. Memorable works portraying such women were also written by male authors, including James Alexander Thom’s 1981 historical novel Follow the River. One anthology of nonfiction essays by Appalachian women writers, Bloodroot (edited by Joyce Dyer, 1998), was widely read in Appalachian studies circles.
The years between 1960 and 2000 saw an increase in the number of regional works that expressed the perspectives of children and childhood. Although generally bearing direct language and straightforward narrative structure, the finest works of regional children’s fiction have represented Appalachian life with the same high standard of accuracy and insight as the most realistic regional fiction works intended for adult readers. Authors from Appalachia known primarily for works written expressly for children include, for the youngest readers, Cynthia Rylant (whose award-winning books include Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds, 1991) and Anne Shelby (author of Homeplace, 1995), and, for slightly older readers, Earl Hamner Jr. (specifically his 1961 novel Spencer’s Mountain), Catherine Marshall (author of the 1967 novel Christy), and Virginia Hamilton (whose award-winning 1974 book M. C. Higgins, the Great portrayed African American life in the region). Several Appalachian authors usually associated with “serious” literature have also written acclaimed works for younger audiences, including James Still (whose best-loved children’s book is Jack and the Wonder Beans, 1977), George Ella Lyon (known for such works for young readers as the 1988 novel Borrowed Children), and Jim Wayne Miller (his 1989 novel Newfound).
Any survey of Appalachian literature—particularly when addressing nonfiction works—is obligated to distinguish between imaginative (or “creative”) nonfiction and academic (or “scholarly”) writing. Subject matter itself is not a useful criterion for evaluating the literary merit of a given nonfiction work because imaginative and academic writings concerned with the region equally focus on Appalachia and its cultural and natural history. The period 1960–2000, which is conterminous with the rise of the interdisciplinary Appalachian studies movement, brought a boom in academic writing about the region. Although some of the more influential books in Appalachian studies—such as David Whisnant’s All That Is Native and Fine (1983)—have been recognized for skillful use of language, academic books are first and foremost of sociological interest and therefore are not considered as literature in this chapter.
Granted that consideration, the last several decades have yielded a number of acclaimed imaginative nonfiction works focusing on the region. Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) was an overtly subjective attempt to interpret a “sense of place” from the Virginia Appalachian landscape. More objective assessments of specific Appalachian environments can be found in such works as Wendell Berry’s The Unforeseen Wilderness (1971), an environmental study of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, and John Fetterman’s Stinking Creek (1967), a War on Poverty-era portrait of one Appalachian community (in Knox County, Kentucky). A nonfiction book from this period, Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1962), offered a polemic discussion of the social, economic, and political issues affecting the coal regions of Appalachia. Of lasting interest not so much for its arguments or for its sometimes oversimplified analyses of complex problems, Night Comes to the Cumberlands is admired today for its powerful, often indignant rhetoric; it is a Jeremiad castigating all participants in what Caudill considered a corrupt coal industry (self-serving coal companies, incompetent government agencies, and unenlightened natives).
Other nonfiction works from 1960–2000 pondered the meaning of Appalachian identity, primarily through first-person accounts relating individual experiences of growing up in the region. Widely read and critically acclaimed autobiographies or memoirs written by people from Appalachia in this period include Alberta Pierson Hannum’s Look Back with Love: A Recollection of the Blue Ridge (1969), Andrew Nelson Lytle’s A Wake for the Living (1975), Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter (written with George Vescey, 1976),Verna Mae Slone’s What My Heart Wants to Tell (1979), Russell Baker’s Growing Up (1982), Garry Barker’s Notes from a Native Son (1995), Homer H. Hickam Jr.’s Rocket Boys (1998), and Linda Scott
DeRozier’s Creeker: A Woman’s Journey (1999). Inevitably, some authors wrote about other people’s experiences: A widely read biography about an individual Appalachian is Richard C. Davids’s The Man Who Moved a Mountain (1970), which tells the life story of Reverend Robert W. Childress Sr. of Patrick County, Virginia.
Fiction and nonfiction may have been the favored genres in Appalachian literature circles between 1960 and 2000 (as in previous historical periods), yet regional poets consistently composed poetry of lasting merit. Although many works of Appalachian fiction and nonfiction attracted a national readership during this period, most regional poetry, regardless of quality, found publication in local and regional magazines and journals and inlimited-distribution books. Contemporary poets from or based in Appalachia who have maintained solid regional reputations include Lee Pennington, Jim Wayne Miller, Jeff Daniel Marion, Kathryn Stripling Byer, James B. Goode, Richard Hague, Maggie Anderson, Lynn Powell, and Ron Rash. Other poets with significant ties to Appalachia—specifically, Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, and Charles Wright—have national reputations. Several authors originally from or living in Appalachia have won major literary awards for their poetry, including Wright, who received the Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 collection Black Zodiac.
Given the historical reliance in Appalachia on the oral tradition and the region’s rich musical heritage, the traditional ballads and lyric songs created or sung in the region constitute a body of texts worthy of mention in any assessment of Appalachian literature (both for their own verbal qualities and for their influence on other, more purely “literary” genres of writing). Previously published surveys of Appalachian literature granted some attention to regional ballads, acknowledging their straightforward yet complex narratives and their influence on such Appalachian writers as Donald Davidson, Jesse Stuart, and James Still. Recent novels by Sharyn McCrumb and Lee Smith offered narratives that expanded on plotlines or themes originally advanced in ballads, suggesting that traditional regional balladry (comprised of British “Child” ballads and “native American” ballads) continues to be a potent influence on contemporary Appalachian literary imaginations.
Distinguishable from ballads by their lack of a central narrative, lyric songs, like ballads, are expressions of the aesthetics and morality of the regional culture that produced them. Certainly, some traditional lyric songs from Appalachia wield verbal power; the aesthetic qualities they reveal include memorable yet simple phrasing and elemental themes (e.g., love, loneliness, death). Evolving out of Appalachian ballad and lyric song traditions has been the genre of the popular song lyric. Since the nineteenth century, known songwriters—many of them amateurs, some of them professionals—have written song lyrics that elaborated on regionally relevant themes (these lyrics accompanied traditional or composed melodies). Many such songs were commercially successful when published as sheet music or, after the 1920s, when incorporated into performances released on commercial recordings; accordingly, throughout the twentieth century, such songs were some of the most widely circulating examples of Appalachian verbal expression. Although few of these song lyrics, if separated from their musical bases, would endure as literary works, it should be noted that several of the more recognized songwriters from the region—from Billy Edd Wheeler and Tom T. Hall to R. B. Morris—also published books bearing their writings in more elite literary genres.
Finally, the period 1960–2000 bore witness to an increase in the number of serious dramatic works about Appalachia. Recognizing the shortcomings of previous efforts to depict Appalachian culture dramatically (mostly in outdoor dramas), playwrights from the region—including Wheeler, Gary Carden, Jo Carson, and Victor Depta—in the last few decades have written plays that are more sophisticated and less stereotyped. One nonnative playwright, Romulus Linney, has directly confronted regional stereotypes in such dramatic works as Why the Lord Came to Sand Mountain (1984) and Mountain Memory (1997). The most controversial drama written about Appalachia is undoubtedly The Kentucky Cycle by Robert Schenkkan (1993); though receiving wide acclaim from outside the region (including the Pulitzer Prize for drama), The Kentucky Cycle was criticized by Appalachian studies scholars for what they deemed to be a negative, stereotyped portrayal of Appalachian people.
By the 1990s and continuing after the year 2000, while other genres of regional writing were receiving attention in more restricted literary circles, Appalachian fiction was reaching the national best-seller lists. Such fictional works—almost all novels rather than short story collections—included Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek (1999), Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer (2000), Silas House’s Clay’s Quilt (2001), and several works each by Sharyn McCrumb, Lee Smith, and Jan Karon. Some of these novels won prestigious literary awards (Cold Mountain, for instance, won the National Book Award), and others among these novels—Karon’s “The Mitford Years” series, for example—hold little pretense of being anything other than popular page-turners.
With Appalachian literature gaining mainstream status nationally, it remains to be seen whether future writings about the region or by Appalachian natives will retain the regional distinctiveness of works already part of the Appalachian literary canon. Significantly, whereas his 1977 article did not forecast the remarkable diversification of Appalachian literature in subsequent decades, in “A People Waking Up: Appalachian Literature Since 1960” (1990), Miller not only anticipated increasing national interest in Appalachian literature by the 1990s but also provided insightful analysis to make sense of that growing popularity.
Despite the implication of its title, Miller’s 1990 article was less a survey of the region’s literature since 1960 than a philosophical discussion of literary regionalism and its present-day manifestations. Exhibiting skepticism toward the current national embrace of “Appalachian” literature, Miller wrote, “What happened in the late 19th century [i.e., the local color movement] is happening again, and for much the same reasons. Much contemporary ‘regional’ writing is a packaging of ‘otherness’ and traditional culture for a mass audience outside the region.”6 Miller’s historically grounded, skeptical approach to studying regional literature might well serve as an ideal model for future scholarly efforts to assess and interpret literary works from or about the region.
NOTES
1. Jim Wayne Miller, “Appalachian Literature,” Appalachian Journal (Special issue: “A Guide to Appalachian Studies”) 5:1 (Autumn 1977): 89.
2. Ibid., 86.
3. W.D. Weatherford and Wilma Dykeman, “Literature since 1900,” in The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, ed. Thomas R. Ford (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), 260–61.
4. Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose N. Manning, eds., Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975), xvii.
5. Ibid., xix.
6. Jim Wayne Miller, “A People Waking Up: Appalachian Literature since 1960,” in The Cratis Williams Symposium Proceedings: A Memorial and Examination of the State of Regional Studies in Appalachia (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1990), 61.
13
Religion
Deborah Vansau McCauley
Religion in Appalachia is as diverse as the landscape it encompasses. In the region’s cities and county seats one can find followers of most any faith practiced in the United States, from American Baptist to Bahai to Antiochian Orthodox to Zen Buddhist, with at least a bit of every flavor in between. Yet Appalachia has been targeted by most mainline Christian denominations as home mission territory, primarily in the expanses of its rural areas, where its people have been deemed largely “unchurched.” That is because Appalachia is also characterized by a distinctive, regionally specific religious tradition to which its “unchurched” people give life.
Appalachia’s regional religious tradition is a uniquely American creation, a product of history, geography, and spirituality. This regional tradition has tended to affect the churches created by home missi
onaries to Appalachia as much as or more than the missionaries’ denominational traditions have affected the many mountain church traditions and religious cultures. There may be a Methodist church in every county of the United States, yet there are United Methodist Churches in Appalachia that would confound non-Appalachian Methodists. Velvet tapestries with the face of Jesus or Leonardo’s Last Supper and blackboards with credal statements chalked on them may occupy the front wall of the sanctuary. Footwashing and “sacrament” (communion) may occur during the New Year’s Eve watch night service, and baptism may take place at a nearby river or creek “in living waters” (a common and old expression). Many Appalachian religious practices are not shed by those joining a mainline denomination. These practices are too powerful in their meaning and have too long-standing a history to be put aside for newer, locally untried practices.
The majority of faithful in Appalachia’s nonurban areas classify themselves as Christian and claim either Baptist or Holiness Pentecostal as their church tradition. This has been true since the nineteenth century and continues today. These church traditions are not frozen in time, nor are they fading away. Even in the twenty-first century, despite changing demographics and a new level of “worldliness” settling on the most recent generation of young Appalachians through influences such as strip malls and satellite TV, these church traditions are vibrantly alive and adapting in their ongoing development. They remain very recognizable in the essential features that have characterized them as special and unique, or at least distinctive, to the mountain regions of Appalachia.
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