Hellfire Fer Sartain is a lovely collection of short stories set in 1920s Virginia. You will love to read these southern tales written in the dialect of the region. Excerpt: Thar was a dancin'-party Christmas night on "Hell fer Sartain." Jes tu'n up the fust crick beyond the bend thar, an' climb onto a stump, an' holler about ONCE, an' you'll see how the name come. Stranger, hit's HELL fer sartain!
Mr. Townsend's fellow countrymen must feel themselves to be put under a beautiful obligation to him by his work entitled Kentucky in American Letters. He has thus fenced off for the lovers of New World literature a well watered bluegrass pasture of prose and verse, which they may enter and range through according to their appetites for its peculiar green provender and their thirst for the limestone spring. This strip of pasture is a hundred years long; its breadth may not be politely questioned! For the backward-looking and for the forward-looking students of American literature, not its merely browsing readers, he has wrought a service of larger and more lasting account. Whether his patiently done and richly crowned work be the first of its class and kind, there is slight need to consider here: fitly enough it might be a pioneer, a path-blazer, as coming from the land of pioneers, path-blazers. But whether or not other works of like character be already in the field of national observation, it is inevitable that many others soon will be. There must in time and in the natural course of events come about a complete marshalling of the American commonwealths, especially of the older American commonwealths, attended each by its women and men of letters; with the final result that the entire pageant of our literary creativeness as a people will thus be exhibited and reviewed within those barriers and divisions, which from the beginning have constituted the peculiar genius of our civilization. When this has been done, when the States have severally made their profoundly significant showing, when the evidence up to some century mark or half-century mark is all presented, then for the first time we, as a reading and thoughtful self-studying people, may for the first time be advanced to the position of beginning to understand what as a whole our cis-Atlantic branch of English literature really is. Thus Mr. Townsend's work and the work of his fellow-craftsmen are all stations on the long road but the right road. They are aids to the marshalling of the American commonwealths at a great meeting-point of the higher influences of our nation. Now, already American literature has long been a subject in regard to which a library of books has been written. The authors of by far the most of these books are themselves Americans, and they have thus looked at our literature and at our civilization from within; the authors of the rest are foreigners who have investigated and philosophized from the outside. Altogether, native and foreign, they have approached their theme from divergent directions, with diverse aims, and under the influence of deep differences in their critical methods and in their own natures. But so far as the writer of these words is aware, no one of them either native or foreign has ever set about the study of American literature, enlightened with the only solvent principle that can ever furnish its solution.
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is a 1908 romance novel/western novel written by John Fox, Jr. Set in the Appalachian Mountains at the turn of the twentieth century, a feud has been boiling for over thirty years between two influential mountain families, the Tollivers and the Falins. The character of Devil Judd Tolliver in the novel was based on the real-life of "Devil John" Wesley Wright, a United States Marshal for the region in and around Wise County, Virginia, and Letcher County, Kentucky.
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come' is a coming-of-age novel by John Fox Jr. It is set during the Kentucky Civil War, and tells the rags-to-respectability tale of orphan Chad Buford. It was the first novel to sell a million copies in the US.
