In the decade following the turn of the century John Fox, Jr., was one of America's most popular novelists, with two of his books, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), enjoying enormous success. With an approach essentially romantic and sentimental, he made some contributions to the historical romance and especially to local-color writing as he wrote about mountaineers in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Born at Stony Point, near Paris, in the bluegrass section of Kentucky on 16 December 1862 or 1863, John William Fox, Jr., was the son of a schoolmaster in Bourbon County. After attending Transylvania College briefly and graduating from Harvard in 1883, he worked in New York for a while as a newspaper reporter. Returning home, he joined his brother in a business venture that eventually took them to Jellico, Tennessee, and then to Big Stone Gap, Virginia. While at Big Stone...