A recipient of the 1985 Bollingen Prize, an award he shared that year with John Ashbery, Fred Chappell is one of the most gifted poets to achieve prominence during the 1970s and 1980s. Among the most notable qualities of Chappell's poetry are its variety of forms, superb storytelling and creation of character, humor, celebration of the Appalachian region's traditional values, and serious moral intent. Chappell's poems reveal both erudition and a profound commitment to what he has called folk art, which is grounded in mimesis and in a vital sense of community.

For Chappell, that sense derives most importantly from his boyhood in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. Chappell was born on 28 May 1936 in Canton, a mill town of roughly five thousand inhabitants some twenty miles west of Asheville, to James and Anne Davis Chappell. His parents were teachers, but his father left that profession to sell...