Hatcher Hughes was a playwright and Columbia University professor best known for his Pulitzer Prize- winning 1924 play, Hell-Bent fer Heaven, and for a subsequent comedy called Ruint (1925), both of which take North Carolina mountaineers for their subject matter.

Harvey Hatcher Hughes was born on 12 February 1881 in Polkville, North Carolina, to Andrew Jackson Hughes and Martha Gold Hughes. Hughes was the tenth of eleven children. His older siblings were Cicero (born 1865), Cora (born 1868), Mollie (born 1868), Sallie (born 1870), Dan (born 1871), John (born 1873), Charlie (born 1875), Gordon (born 1877), and George (born 1878); his younger sister was Fannie (born 1884). Hughes's birth year is widely misreported as either 1886 or 1883. The date of 1881, however, is that given in the biographical sketch by Richard Walser that accompanies Hughes's papers in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Walser's document was contributed to and reviewed by members of Hughes's immediate family, so...