SOURCE: "Jesse Stuart's Use of Local Legends," in Jack London Newsletter, Vol. 10, No. 2, May-August, 1977, pp. 63-70.

In the following essay, Clarke perceives Stuart's use of local legend as "providing a felicitous vehicle for his perception of a changing society within a framework of timeless nature."

It is a truism of Jesse Stuart scholarship that the author's literary projection of his native W-Hollow setting, with all that such a projection implies, has provided him with his most successful literary capital. Two biographical facts have given strong direction to his use of it—his early formative years of being locked into an extremely conservative and primitive way of life and his exposure during a year at Vanderbilt University to influences from some of the most sophisticated Southern literati of the 1920s and 1930s. This superficially incongruous yoking together of influences proved fortuitous, producing a unique corpus that can be examined...