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The Run for the Elbertas
In language both spare and colorful, sure in its command of Appalachian dialect and poetic in its evocation of mountain settings, James Still's stories reveal the lives of his people -- lives of privation and struggle, lived with honesty as well as humor. With a foreword by Cleanth Brooks and an afterword by the author, "The Run for the Elbertas" features thirteen stories from one of America's masters of the short story. Enjoyable and enriching, Still's stories sparkle with wisdom and joy.
160 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 1980
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About the author
James Still
35 books42 followersFor the American playwright, see James Still.
James Still (July 16, 1906 – April 28, 2001) was an Appalachian poet, novelist and folklorist. He lived most of his life in a log house along the Dead Mare Branch of Little Carr Creek, Knott County, Kentucky. He was best known for the novel River of Earth, which depicted the struggles of coal mining in eastern Kentucky.
Still’s mother was sixteen when she moved to Alabama due to a tornado destroying the family home. His father was a horse doctor with no formal training. James Still was born July 16, 1906 near Lafayette, Chambers County, Alabama. Still was considered a quiet child but a hard worker. He along with his nine siblings worked the family farm. They farmed cotton, sugar cane, soybeans and corn. At the age of seven, Still began grade school. He found greater interest not in the school text books but at home where there was an edition of the Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge. He became enriched with philosophy, physics and the great British poets – Shakespeare and Keats.
After graduating from high school, Still attended Lincoln Memorial University of Harrogate, Tennessee. He worked at the rock quarry in the afternoons and as a library janitor in the evenings. He would often sleep at the library after spending the night reading countless literature. In 1929, he graduated from Lincoln and headed over to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. While there, he became involved in a controversial miner strike in Wilder, Tennessee. The miners were starving due to holding the picket line; Still delivered a truckload of food and clothing for the miners. After a year at Vanderbilt, he transferred to the University of Illinois and earned a graduate degree.
Still tried various professions including the Civil Service Corps, Bible salesman and even had a stint picking cotton in Texas. His friend Don West – a poet, civil rights activist, among other things – offered Still a job organizing recreation programs for a Bible school in Knott County, Kentucky. Still accepted the position but soon became a volunteer librarian at the Hindman Settlement School. Knott County, would become Still’s lifelong home.
James Still served as a Sergeant in the US Army in WWII and was stationed in Egypt in 1944.
Still moved into a two-story log house once occupied by a fine crafter of dulcimers, Jethro Amburgey. He would remain here till his death. Here, he began writing his masterpiece, River of Earth. It was published February 5, 1940. River of Earth depicts the struggles of a family trying to survive by either subsisting off the land or entering the coal mines of the Cumberland Plateau in the reaches of eastern Kentucky. Still depicts the Appalachian mining culture with ease. Mines close often and the family is forced to move and find other means to survive. Still received the Southern Author's Award shortly after publication which he shared with Thomas Wolfe for his work You Can’t Go Home Again. Still went on to publish a few collections of poetry and short stories, a juvenile novel and a compilation of Appalachian local color he collected over the years. The children's book "Jack and the Wonderbeans" was adapted for the stage by the Lexington Children's Theatre in 1992. Still participated in one performance, reading a portion of the book to open the show. He died April 28, 2001 at the age of 94.
James Still (July 16, 1906 – April 28, 2001) was an Appalachian poet, novelist and folklorist. He lived most of his life in a log house along the Dead Mare Branch of Little Carr Creek, Knott County, Kentucky. He was best known for the novel River of Earth, which depicted the struggles of coal mining in eastern Kentucky.
Still’s mother was sixteen when she moved to Alabama due to a tornado destroying the family home. His father was a horse doctor with no formal training. James Still was born July 16, 1906 near Lafayette, Chambers County, Alabama. Still was considered a quiet child but a hard worker. He along with his nine siblings worked the family farm. They farmed cotton, sugar cane, soybeans and corn. At the age of seven, Still began grade school. He found greater interest not in the school text books but at home where there was an edition of the Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge. He became enriched with philosophy, physics and the great British poets – Shakespeare and Keats.
After graduating from high school, Still attended Lincoln Memorial University of Harrogate, Tennessee. He worked at the rock quarry in the afternoons and as a library janitor in the evenings. He would often sleep at the library after spending the night reading countless literature. In 1929, he graduated from Lincoln and headed over to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. While there, he became involved in a controversial miner strike in Wilder, Tennessee. The miners were starving due to holding the picket line; Still delivered a truckload of food and clothing for the miners. After a year at Vanderbilt, he transferred to the University of Illinois and earned a graduate degree.
Still tried various professions including the Civil Service Corps, Bible salesman and even had a stint picking cotton in Texas. His friend Don West – a poet, civil rights activist, among other things – offered Still a job organizing recreation programs for a Bible school in Knott County, Kentucky. Still accepted the position but soon became a volunteer librarian at the Hindman Settlement School. Knott County, would become Still’s lifelong home.
James Still served as a Sergeant in the US Army in WWII and was stationed in Egypt in 1944.
Still moved into a two-story log house once occupied by a fine crafter of dulcimers, Jethro Amburgey. He would remain here till his death. Here, he began writing his masterpiece, River of Earth. It was published February 5, 1940. River of Earth depicts the struggles of a family trying to survive by either subsisting off the land or entering the coal mines of the Cumberland Plateau in the reaches of eastern Kentucky. Still depicts the Appalachian mining culture with ease. Mines close often and the family is forced to move and find other means to survive. Still received the Southern Author's Award shortly after publication which he shared with Thomas Wolfe for his work You Can’t Go Home Again. Still went on to publish a few collections of poetry and short stories, a juvenile novel and a compilation of Appalachian local color he collected over the years. The children's book "Jack and the Wonderbeans" was adapted for the stage by the Lexington Children's Theatre in 1992. Still participated in one performance, reading a portion of the book to open the show. He died April 28, 2001 at the age of 94.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 20, 2021
As you may know, James Still, "the dean of Appalachian literature," was the kind of person who could create one of the great masterworks of Appalachian (and thereby American) lit in his novel River of Earth, and also quietly support striking miners in Wilder Tennessee, serve stints as volunteer librarian at Hindman Settlement School, and dip into a slew of other jobs and places in southeastern Appalachia that show a both a binding affection for the region and a commitment to gathering authentic material for his writing. He settled as an adult in Eastern KY and lived there, writing, in the sticks, till his death, despite colleagues' efforts to bring him back to academia. Wendell Berry—a much more prolific (and famous) Kentucky writer—owes Still a significant debt, which he has gratefully acknowledged.
This collection of short stories, published forty years after his breakout novel ROE, is subtle and understated, if a bit underdeveloped. A few of the stories, like "Locust Summer," "The Quare Day," and "The Run for the Elbertas," are compact and modern in their structure, though Still's use of dialect and rural Applachian idiom/syntax occasionally distract from the story—more on that later. Even though I've never really studied short stories I found the arc of tension to be really moving in many of the stories. Those written from the perspective of a young boy were uncluttered, simple in their close observations of the attitudes and anxieties of parents and other adults, sensitive in their rendering of fears and joys. Others written with detached narration were similarly spare, sketching out intimate glimpses of interactions between a person and a cultural signpost that—Still seems to have believed—were important to represent, and remember.
A few examples: the tradition of sorghum-making, and of flinging an unsuspecting (or resigned) victim into the hole (the sorghum hole, or "soup hole") dug in the ground to hold the green frothy skimmings as the sorghum boiled down; letters written home to parents by kids who leave the mountains and will never return; fierce rivalries between coal-town schoolhouses and the odd space occupied and shaped by the school teachers, who were usually outsiders.
So the Appalachian dialect. I can’t remember what the consensus is, now, on using “eye dialect” in fiction, except that I was very pleased by how accent was represented in Shuggie Bain, a recent novel set in Scotland, in which most spellings were standard but a couple chosen for phonetic spelling because they were immediately recognizable and evocative in a very pure sense. However, traditionally, Appalachian fiction (like Still’s) traditionally goes for broke, attempting to capture a sound, apostrophes speckling the page like rain on packed dirt. Not a bad thing. I get the impulse. Regional accent is like a scent; a subtlety that can evoke a very specific, and often very familiar, time and place. It bypasses the prefrontal cortex like a perfume. If you know, you know. But it is so hard to read, and has been used so often to poor effect and like, you know, the worst kind of alienating classism and racism, that I ended this collection a little wistful, wishing the language could be reworked. But I can see its gifts, and part of its beauty is in its difficulty.
This collection of short stories, published forty years after his breakout novel ROE, is subtle and understated, if a bit underdeveloped. A few of the stories, like "Locust Summer," "The Quare Day," and "The Run for the Elbertas," are compact and modern in their structure, though Still's use of dialect and rural Applachian idiom/syntax occasionally distract from the story—more on that later. Even though I've never really studied short stories I found the arc of tension to be really moving in many of the stories. Those written from the perspective of a young boy were uncluttered, simple in their close observations of the attitudes and anxieties of parents and other adults, sensitive in their rendering of fears and joys. Others written with detached narration were similarly spare, sketching out intimate glimpses of interactions between a person and a cultural signpost that—Still seems to have believed—were important to represent, and remember.
A few examples: the tradition of sorghum-making, and of flinging an unsuspecting (or resigned) victim into the hole (the sorghum hole, or "soup hole") dug in the ground to hold the green frothy skimmings as the sorghum boiled down; letters written home to parents by kids who leave the mountains and will never return; fierce rivalries between coal-town schoolhouses and the odd space occupied and shaped by the school teachers, who were usually outsiders.
So the Appalachian dialect. I can’t remember what the consensus is, now, on using “eye dialect” in fiction, except that I was very pleased by how accent was represented in Shuggie Bain, a recent novel set in Scotland, in which most spellings were standard but a couple chosen for phonetic spelling because they were immediately recognizable and evocative in a very pure sense. However, traditionally, Appalachian fiction (like Still’s) traditionally goes for broke, attempting to capture a sound, apostrophes speckling the page like rain on packed dirt. Not a bad thing. I get the impulse. Regional accent is like a scent; a subtlety that can evoke a very specific, and often very familiar, time and place. It bypasses the prefrontal cortex like a perfume. If you know, you know. But it is so hard to read, and has been used so often to poor effect and like, you know, the worst kind of alienating classism and racism, that I ended this collection a little wistful, wishing the language could be reworked. But I can see its gifts, and part of its beauty is in its difficulty.
December 16, 2024
My heart feels so blessed. The connection of my hometown and James Still makes this one a little more special than most books I’ve read this year.
November 13, 2020
Folksy tale by The Godfather of Appalachian Literature.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews