Wade Hall - The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State

Two Hundred Years of Writing
in the Bluegrass State

Edited by
Wade Hall

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 2005 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.

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Because this page cannot legibly accommodate all the copyright notices, the notices appear at the back of the book in a section titled Copyrights and Permissions, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

I wish to thank my editor, Gena Henry, a knowledgeable, affirming literary companion and guide; David Cobb, whose editorial expertise and hawk-eye diligence kept us on the straight and narrow paths and bypaths; Danielle Dove, who took a mountain of words and created a design that makes this book both attractive and readable; Stephen Wrinn, the visionary director of the University Press of Kentucky, who set us on our way with godspeed and sufficient supplies and directions; Gregg Swem, the native Kentuckian who has provided invaluable aid and encouragement every step of the way. I send warm thanks especially to the thousands of Kentucky students with whom I have made many Kentucky journeys for more than forty years. Enjoy now the fruits of our labors.

This volume is dedicated to Dr. Thomas D. Clark (19032005). I had the good sense to follow his lead to Kentucky from the lower South, thirty-one years later.

Come with me on a journey of exploration and discovery. Its a Kentucky journey you can take anytime it pleases youday or night, winter or summer, in sunshine or rain. Open this book and join the adventure at any pointfrom Daniel Boones account of his early years in the Kentucky wilderness to Bobbie Ann Masons memoir of her mothers heroic contest with a fish of epic proportions in western Kentucky. It is a journey that will titillate, irritate, educate, delight, and enlighten you, a journey with a Kentucky accent that has been in the making for over two centuries. Our Kentucky trip is not only geographical and historical but social, political, economic, racial, religious, and literary. It chronicles our interests and aspirations, our achievements and failures, our comedies and tragedies. Indeed, this collection of Kentucky writing seeks to cover a wide spectrum of subjects and events that have made our state unique and American.

Some of the landscape you will recognize as we pass through. Some you will not know, for we will be exploring new ground as we seek to redefine Kentuckys heritage by claiming territories heretofore shunned or unknown. You will find a road filled with potholes, alluring diversions, and occasional epiphanies. In fact, during our Kentucky journey you will hear Whitmanesque voices of human aspirations, failures, and achievements that are common to us all.

A motley crew of writers will be your guides. In the early years they are hunters, soldiers and adventurers, travelers and tourists, land speculators and Indian fighters, even outlaws; later, they are farmers, lawyers, preachers, physicians, and educators; and more recently they are journalists, historians, playwrights, novelists, and poets. In May 1780 John Adams described the beauties of Paris in a letter to his wife, Abigail, while he was on a diplomatic mission, then added wistfully: I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry, Mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. Likewise, the early Kentuckians were occupied with basic human needs for the better part of their first century and had little time for the arts.

This is not to say that Kentuckians as early as the 1770s were not writing. In fact, they were writing diaries, letters, laws, sermons, and legal documents. Squire Boone, the preacher brother of Daniel, is alleged to have written a crude couplet. As you will see in the early chapters of this collection, most of their early writing was utilitarian: military, political, promotional, and religious. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that Kentuckians had the wealth and leisure, as well as a usable past, to produce a large body of fine poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. But let us put state chauvinism aside and be honest. Kentucky produced no world-class literary talent before Robert Penn Warren. The last six chapters, however, showcase how well Kentucky writers have fared during the states second century, when some of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century called Kentucky home. Joy Bale Boone once reported gleefully that tiny Todd County, in southwestern Kentucky, had produced within a single life span three literary luminariesDorothy Dix, Caroline Gordon, and Robert Penn Warren. It is a legacy that any state would be proud to claim.

In 1913 John Wilson Townsend published a two-volume anthology called Kentucky in American Letters 17841912, which surveyed Kentucky writers from John Filson to James Lane Allen. In his introduction Townsend reported that he had identified more than 1,000 Kentucky writers but that he could choose only 196 for his collection. He promised that he would eventually publish a dictionary of Kentucky writers, in which he would honor all 1,000 of them, as well as all the scattered crossroads poets that he could find. Sadly, his grandiose plans never came to fruition. Even though we would not consider most of the writers included in his volumes serious writers at all, my task has been more daunting than his because, as the twentieth century ran its course, great numbers of Kentucky writers began producing prose and poetry good enough to compete with that of writers anywhere. I have, consequently, been forced to make this anthology representative and selective.