With his friends Jesse Stuart and Harriette Simpson Arnow, James Still is perhaps the best known and most respected of Appalachian writers. His prose and poetry both deal with the people and places he knows in Knott County, Kentucky, and take place, for the most part, during a single decade. Still says that his time block includes the crash year of 1929 and goes to about 1940.

James Still has enjoyed occasional national recognition since 1936, when the Atlantic Monthly published one of his stories, "All Their Ways Are Dark." His story "Bat Flight" won the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1939, and his first novel, River of Earth shared the Southern Authors Award in 1940 with Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. In 1941, another story by Still was chosen to appear in the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories, and in 1946, 1950, and 1952, his work appeared in Best American Short Stories. Still has...