Jesse Stuart: The Heritage

by David Dick

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 Basing his biography on Jesse Stuart’s voluminous writings and on hitherto unpublished correspondence with family, friends, and literary mentors – and using language as colorful as Jesse’s own – David Dick gives us intimate glimpses of the Man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 Jesse the stury 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.

292 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Doctor VanNostrum · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a personal reminiscence of Stuart from someone who knew him, it is a good book. The writing style is breezier than my preferences usually run. There are other biographies of Stuart than are more scholarly and more detailed.