After twenty-six-year-old author Breece D'J Pancake took his own life in April 1979, the West Virginian's posthumously published short-story collection made a considerable impact on the world of letters. In A Room Forever, Thomas E. Douglass offers a detailed portrait of Pancake's short life, examining the varied circumstances and emotional forces that led to the writer's suicide and exploring Pancake's influence on contemporary fiction generally and Appalachian writing in particular. Douglass has recreated the key events of the young artist's life: his West Virginia childhood, his romantic...

First published in 1946, Harry Kroll's portrayal of the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud (1878-90) is seen through the eyes of six women of the two families. Their Ancient Grudge stands as the last major treatment of this iconic sliver of American culture completed before the story struggle was examined and reinterpreted by of a later generation of historians. Although the brutal cycle of the conflict often takes center stage, the novel is replete with sensitive observations of Appalachian nature and landscape, and most strikingly, the cultural positions occupied by women.
In crafting this...

Hailing from the small river town of Moundsville, West Virginia, Davis Grubb (1919-1980) became a key figure in the canon of Appalachian literature. The author of ten novels and dozens of short stories and radio plays, Grubb's writings, as Tom Douglass observes, ""catalogued his life"". This biography, the first ever written of Grubb, captures his life and work in all their intriguing complexity.