Mt. Pleasant

by Elmo Howell

Another of Elmo Howell's Mississippi books, MT PLEASANT---a collection of poetic sketches with photographs---recalls a community in Itawamba County in the early 1900's. With the Appalachian range reaching out to that corner of the state, an old mountain culture still held the church was the center of life, along with a two-teacher school (which the author attended through the eighth grade) and a store and gristmill at the foot of the hill. The twentieth century was a long ways off.
Mr Howell writes with affection for the life he remembers, exulting in language, eccentricity, superstition, belief---but in full awareness of his community's fate. The frontier settlement with a character of its own faced hard going in the years ahead.

82 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001