John Fox, Jr., Appalachian Author

Book excerpt: John Fox, Jr., was one of the first writers to use the mountains of southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky as a backdrop for his stories and novels about a people whose culture faced extinction. Writing was not a profession he chose quickly or painlessly--he was well into middle age when he made the decision and he struggled with his choice for a long time after--but he made quite a name for himself through his work. This work is a biography of Fox. It draws from personal and family correspondence and covers his entire life, from his birth in Stony Point, Kentucky, in 1862, to his death from pneumonia in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, in 1919. His early life and education at his father's school, his two years at Transylvania University in Lexington, his transfer to Harvard and graduation in 1883, his work for the New York Sun and Times and smaller newspapers, and return home in the mid-1880s to work with his half-brother in the coal mines are all documented. It was also around this time that he began his first novel, A Mountain Europa, and over the next thirty years he wrote dozens of short stories and nine novels from the family home in Big Stone Gap, including Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (his first to gain the status of bestseller) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.