Born in Schuyler, Virginia, to Earl Henry and Doris Marion Gianinni Hamner, Earl Henry Hamner, Jr., was the eldest of eight children--three girls and five boys. The historical circumstances of his birth--both time and place--account, in varying degrees, for the nature of his writings. Schuyler, situated in sparsely populated Nelson County, was a typical small Southern town, a "community" in the Eudora Welty sense. Community is at times both the means to and the ends of man's aspirations. With Charlottesville, Virginia, just thirty miles away, the spirit of Jeffersonian democracy is integral to the town. The unity of man and land which Hamner expresses in his best work may, indeed, be seen as Jeffersonian Southernness and may well be the key to the image of Hamner's fictional Spencer's Mountain which symbolizes the human freedom possible through man's interaction with the land and with his tradition.

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