SOURCE: 'The South: Miss Murfree and Cable," in The Times of Melville and Whitman, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1947, pp. 378-94.

Brooks was an American poet. In the following excerpt, he praises Murfree's writing for its realistic rendering of a previously "unknown human sphere, " but finds the use of dialect nearly "unreadable. "

In [Mary Murfree's] many stories, long and short, the same characters reappeared that one met in her first book, In the Tennessee Mountains, but this and The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains revealed an unknown human sphere in a way that was singularly real, impressive and poetic. One of the recurring themes was that of the cultivated stranger who meets the unsophisticated mountain girl, and many of the stories dealt with the conflicts of the mountain folk and the world outside which the revenueofficer and the sheriff represented. Among the other local types were the...