James Still

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First published in 1940, James Still’s masterful novel has become a classic. It is the story, seen through the eyes of a boy, of three years in the life of his family and their kin. He sees his parents pulled between the meager farm with its sense of independence and the mining camp with its uncertain promise of material prosperity. In his world privation, violence, and death are part of everyday life, accepted and endured. Yet it is a world of dignity, love, and humor, of natural beauty which Still evokes in sharp, poetic images. No writer has caught more effectively the vividness of mountain speech or shown more honestly the trials and joys of mountain life.

Mr. Still's local language is true and good. -- Lincoln Herald Times

A tenderly written and well-sustained story. -- New York Times

His characters are endowed with vigor and stature. Its achievement as an artisic creation of a people and a locale is as sound as its pretensions are modest. -- Saturday Review of Books

Still tells of [his people's] japes and sorrows and near starvation, the rich archaic poetry of their talk and customs in a clear, dry style as unsentimental as his seven-year-old's eyes. He has produced a work of art. -- Time Magazine

As you read you can hear the redbirds in the plum thickets and smell the pawpaws at first frost; you know, too, what it means to scrape the bottom of the meat box with a plow blade, hunting for a rind of pork amid the salt when the mines are closed. -- Washington Post

There is hunger and suffering and death in this child's experience but there is also laughter, riddles and tales told from the past, and the surrounding natural landscape moving from one season to the next. The reappearance of River of Earth is a welcome literary event. -- Wilma Dykeman, South Atlantic Bulletin

Among best novels, we may distinguish between "greats" and smaller masterpieces... Small masterpieces are not so deep nor so grand in scope. Yet their art may be just as exquisite, for these books render a limited human action just right. You finish them thinking you would neither change a word nor omit a scene. Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop is such a book; so is Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Another work of fiction that surely ranks among America's small masterpieces is as Kentuckian as a book can be. This is James Still's River of Earth... From first to last, Still's scenic art is nearabout perfect. It yields a carefully observed canvas of life of a particular place and time. -- Advocate-Messenger -- James L. Nicholson -- Advocate-Messenger

Publication Date

12-31-1978

Publisher

The University Press of Kentucky

Place of Publication

Lexington, KY

ISBN

9780813113722

eISBN

9780813146355

Keywords

Appalachian Region, Appalachia

Disciplines

American Literature

River of Earth
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