Hard Cover - 312 Pages
Includes Eight Pages of
Black & White Photos
©2004
ISBN: 0-9755037-0-7
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JESSE STUART–poet, novelist, short story writer, and teacher–comes vividly to life once more in David Dick's bold and imaginative new biography. Born to tenant farmers in a remote corner of Kentucky in 1906, Jesse Stuart was imbued from his earliest days with an unstoppable drive to "be somebody"–to achieve an education, to rise from poverty, to capture in words the wonders of the natural world around him, and to tell, in their own speech, the stories of the simple and steadfast Appalachian people he knew and loved.
Basing his biography on Jesse Stuart's voluminous writings and on hitherto unpublished correspondence with family, friends, and literary mentors–and using language as colorful as Jesse's own–David Dick gives us intimate glimpses of the Man from W-Hollow as never before seen: Jesse the sturdy boy, writing his first poems on the backs of leaves, walking the miles to Plum Grove School and learning to give as good as he got with school bullies. Jesse the fledgling adult, tasting the first heady breaths of freedom with a traveling carnival and testing his manhood in the steel mills, then heading south to find a college that would accept a boy with no money but with a raging drive to succeed. Jesse the young teacher, urging his students to write what they know. And Jesse the man, journeying to the homeland of his literary hero, Bobby Burns, then discovering a still wider world that would one day welcome him as an ambassador for better education.
Here too is the Jesse Stuart whose imagination constantly overflowed with poems and stories that demanded to be set down and sent out into the world, defying the prejudices of a literary establishment that often saw him as a "hillbilly" lacking in discipline and polish. To his millions of admirers, he was simply Jesse, one of Appalachia's most beloved writers.
At the heart of Jesse Stuart's story stands Naomi Dean Norris Stuart, "my Deanie," the helpmeet who nurtured him through a life of struggle and triumph, and who nursed him through the long years of declining health. Theirs is a love story as touching as any in American literary history.
For Jesse Stuart's myriad admirers and those who have yet to discover his poems, novels, and stories, here is the essential introduction, as only another master storyteller can reveal him.
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