John Frederick Matheus was born, one of four sons, in Keyser, West Virginia, to John William and Mary Susan Brown Matheus, on 10 September 1887. His father was a bank messenger who also worked part-time in a tannery. When Matheus was young, his family moved ten miles up the Ohio River to Steubenville, Ohio, where he spent his youth. Many of Matheus's twenty-four stories take place in this area at the convergence of West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where, he wrote, "even as the black coal seams run under hills, mountains and deep into the ground, so runs that other black seam of race and color."

Matheus recalls that as a young boy, he enjoyed Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which he read to his grandmother--an ex-slave who could neither read nor write. This story had a profound influence on him as a writer and humanist. Matheus also found...