Authors in History

Harry Norman Dean, formerly of Cartersville, was a resident of Cleveland, Tennessee from 1971 until his death in 2008. Mr. Dean received his B.A. from Carson Newman College and M.A. and ED.S. degrees from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

He served in the field of education for more than thirty-five years. He was employed with Cleveland State Community College as an associate professor of English. He served as a member of the Faculty Senate and was selected as an Outstanding Faculty Member. He was a noted author and published several books of poems.

Mr. Dean was passionate about many varied styles of music, wrote songs, played several musical instruments, participated in traditional folk and bluegrass music sessions, and was a former member of the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera Chorus.

A brilliant, eccentric, and complex man, James Dickey was not afraid to express his opinion and step outside the traditional creative boundaries of writing to explore new and unique forms. His fascination with nature and exploring the beast within man became an essential part of his legacy.

Dickey was born in Buckhead, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to Eugene and Maibelle Dickey. He had a very close relationship with his father, a lawyer whom Dickey referred to as “the grand old man of American cockfighting.” Dickey’s love of poetry did not truly develop until he was in the Air Force, where he flew more than 100 combat missions in the Philippines as a member of the 418th Night Fighter Squadron. In 1946, Dickey left the military to enroll at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, majoring in English and Philosophy with a minor in Astronomy. In 1948 Dickey married Maxine Syerson and published his first poem, “The Shark in the Window,” in The Sewanee Review. He graduated magna cum laude a year later with his B.A. in English. After receiving his M.A., Dickey taught at the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas, until the Air Force recalled him to serve in the Korean War, where he earned five bronze stars and was promoted to Second Lieutenant.

Following the war, Dickey accepted a position at the University of Florida, but resigned a year later after controversy of his poem, “The Father’s Body,” which many considered offensive. In remembering that period of his life Dickey said, “I thought if my chosen profession, teaching, was going to fall out to be that sort of situation, I’d rather go for the buck…I figured that the kind of thing that an advertising writer would be able to write, I could do with the little finger of the left hand…” Dickey’s prophecy proved true and he worked as an advertising copywriter and executive for various agencies until he published his first book, Into the Stone and Other Poems, in 1960. By this time Dickey had celebrated the birth of two of his sons and received numerous awards, including the Longview Foundation Award and the Vachel Lindsay Prize.

Dickey was not only prolific in his writing but also where he worked, serving as poet-in-residence in four different locations, before becoming Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress for two years. Previous to serving in this honored position, Dickey published Buckdancer’s Choice, which won the National Book Award in 1966. His use of free, blank, and split verse in his poetry is noted as an art form in itself. Paul Zweig of the New York Times Review said, “Dickey’s style is so personal, his rhythms so willfully eccentric, that the poems seem to swell up and overflow…” Occasionally criticized for his obsession with death and destruction, Dickey’s poems essentially focus on nature itself and the reaction of humankind when faced with extreme circumstances. Monroe K. Spears in Dionysus and City: Modernism in Twentieth-Century Poetry reinforces this consensus, proposing that “the central impulse of Dickey’s poetry may be…indentifying with human or other creatures in moments of ultimate confrontation…A good example is [the poem] ‘Falling’, which imagines the thoughts and feelings of an airline stewardess, accidentally swept through an emergency door, as she falls thousands of feet to her death.”

Although a renowned poet, Dickey is best known for his 1970 novel, Deliverance. The book was so successful that a year after its publication it was adapted for film; Dickey wrote the screenplay and played the role of Sheriff Bullard. Deliverance is aptly named for that is exactly what the novel is about: being rescued from captivity, hardship, dominating over evil and seeking deliverance from imprisonment. The novel follows the story of four men who decide to take a backwoods canoeing trip. Two of the men are subsequently attacked by locals. One of the men is raped while the other is spared after the rest of the group show up and kill one of the natives. The rest of the story concerns the men’s escape and the struggle to avoid being murdered by vengeful locals. The novel is ultimately about the men finding themselves through each other; together they are complete. As the character Lewis says, “Sometimes you have to lose yourself ‘fore you can find anything.”

Through the following years Dickey continued to teach and write, publishing more novels and numerous poems. He also wrote the screenplay for the television production of Jack London’s Call of the Wild in 1976. That same year his wife passed away. Two months past, not able to bear being alone, Dickey married a former student, Deborah Dodson. In 1977, Dickey was asked to read his poem “The Strength of Fields” at President Jimmy Carter’s inaugural celebration. Four years after this honor, Dickey’s daughter Bronwen was born. Shortly following this happy event, Dickey won the Levinson Prize for five of his poems from Puella and in 1995 he was featured in a World War II Writers Symposium. A year later he published Striking In: The Early Notebooks of James Dickey, and received the Harriet Monroe Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry.

Dickey was still teaching when he died on January 19, 1997, from fibrosis of the lungs. He will always be known for his exploration of human nature and the brute within, for putting these traits into perspective, but what few realize is that he also wanted his readers to know that his writing was about reconciliation with these animalistic traits and finding eternal happiness. In an interview shortly before his death, Dickey quoted Beethoven: “He who truly knows my music can never know unhappiness again,” saying, “I would like to think [my work] had some effect to that.”

Robert Young Drake, Jr. was born in Ripley, Tennessee on October 20, 1930. He attended Vanderbilt University, receiving his B.A. in 1952 and M.A. in 1953, and Yale, receiving another M.A. in 1954 and his Ph.D. in 1955.

Drake taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1955-58), at Northwestern University (1958-61), at the University of Texas (1961-65), and at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (1965-1999). He wrote numerous short stories and non-fiction, as well as memoirs of West Tennessee during the first half of the twentieth century. On June 30, 2001, Drake passed away at his home in Milan, Tennessee.

Will Allen Dromgoole was born in Murfreesboro, the last child of John Easter and Rebecca Blanche Dromgoole. When she was six, Dromgoole changed her middle name to Allen, and throughout her life was known as Will Allen or “Miss Will.” In 1876 Dromgoole graduated from the Clarksville Female Academy and studied at the New England School of Expression in Boston. After her mother’s death in 1884 and confronted with the responsibility of caring for her aging father, Dromgoole began her writing career. She published a sentimental novel, The Sunny Side of the Cumberland, under the name Will Allen in 1886; her first short story, “Columbus Tucker’s Discontent,” was published in and awarded a cash prize by Youth’s Companion in 1886. Dromgoole studied law with her father and in 1885 and 1887 won terms as an engrossing clerk in the state Senate. She was defeated in 1889 and 1891, possibly because her unflattering portraits of the Melungeons, an East Tennessee mountain community, in articles published in the Nashville Daily American (1890) and the Boston Arena (1891) angered the senators who represented them. Beginning in 1890, Dromgoole edited and contributed to Will Allen’s Journal: A Literary Society Weekly, published in Nashville for several years.

After public criticism following the second defeat in 1891, Dromgoole traveled to Texas, where she taught, wrote for newspapers, and founded the Waco Women’s Press Club in 1894. On her return to Nashville, Dromgoole spent most of her time with her father, who died in 1897, and in 1898 published a tribute to their life together, Rare Old Chums. Continuing to reside in Nashville, Dromgoole returned frequently to the “Yellowhammer’s Nest,” a cabin located in Estill Springs. In this peaceful refuge bought with her first earnings in 1887, she enjoyed hunting, fishing, and writing. The cabin and all of its contents were destroyed by fire in 1972.

Having written for the Nashville Banner since 1900, Dromgoole was hired as a permanent staff member in 1902 and in 1903 began her immensely popular column, “Song and Story,” which continued for thirty-one years. Shortly after the United States entered World War I in 1917, she volunteered her services to the U.S. Navy and in May was recruited as a yeomanry warrant officer, perhaps the first female to serve in this capacity. She was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, where her official responsibilities included working at the base library, recruiting young men into the navy, visiting ships, and delivering patriotic speeches. Her columns continued during this period, but she wrote about Virginia instead of Nashville. Dromgoole returned to the Banner in late 1918 and was named literary editor in 1922, remaining in that position until her death in 1934.

Dromgoole was in great demand as a speaker to literary groups, patriotic clubs, and writing circles during her life; she was named Poet Laureate by the Poetry Society of the South in 1930. Among her many literary achievements are thirteen books, dozens of stories, over eight thousand poems, over five thousand newspaper columns, several nonfiction articles, an operetta, and two plays. In all of these she depicts the hill folk of East and Middle Tennessee or the residents, poor and wealthy, black and white, of Nashville.

Dromgoole is buried in the Evergreen Cemetery in Murfreesboro.

In 1955, seven years before the publication of Rachel Carson’s famed Silent Spring, another woman fought to issue her own groundbreaking analysis of environmental concerns.

Wilma Dykeman spent years studying the rivers of western North Carolina, but after she wrote her book The French Broad, her publishers tried to remove the chapters on pollution. However, Dykeman prevailed, and in addition to bringing river contamination to the nation’s attention, won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Trophy, and inclusion in the Rivers of America series. The river itself became an important aspect of Dykeman’s work, as she focused much of her life and writing in the mountains of western North Carolina and east Tennessee.

“I’d always been aware of the great natural resources we have here, and I became very concerned about the water pollution. I mean, [The French Broad]…has been destroyed because of greed and selfishness and apathy on all our parts,” she once said.

The river communities thanked her by developing the Wilma Dykeman RiverWay, a seventeen-mile greenway between the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers in Asheville, North Carolina. It marks Dykeman’s ahead-of-her-time contribution to the environment, as well as her equally progressive stances on gender and race relations.

She first tackled race issues with her husband, James Stokely, whom she wed in 1940, after the two graduated from Northwestern University. Their book, Neither Black Nor White (1957), portrayed their personal reflections on the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court Case. After its publication, the duo won the Hillman Award for contributions to world peace, civil liberties, and race relations.

Dykeman embraced her newfound motivational powers. “What has always stirred action?” she once wrote. “What has usually stirred societies, historically, to action? We had any number of reports about slavery, but it was Uncle Tom’s Cabin that lit the fuse… A novel, there, really galvanized the whole action. What is it that we have from societies today that we remember, that we know about societies of the past, their conflicts? It’s the literature… It is absolutely essential that we each respect each other.”

Dykeman and Stokely collaborated on several other projects, and as Appalachian writer Jeff Daniel Marion claimed, they were partners in “every sense of the word… partners in writing, partners in marriage and partners in having similar points of view,” until Stokely died in 1977. Dykeman never remarried, though she lived another thirty years.

In addition her position on race relations, Dykeman always felt that “the Appalachian woman has had a rather difficult time being understood,” and in order to rectify the image, wrote her first work of fiction, The Tall Woman, in 1962. The heroine of the novel, Lydia McQueen, fights to build a school for Appalachian children, which also projects Dykeman’s firm beliefs on the value of education.

“It seemed to me that another way to communicate some of these things was through a novel, that people could be involved in the people’s lives in a novel in a way they were not in the nonfiction books,” she explained.

Dykeman wrote a follow-up, The Far Family, published in 1966, which continued to focus on the role of an Appalachian family from the Civil War to the twentieth century. To further promote social change, Dykeman completed a project on Edna Rankin McKinnon, a pioneer in family planning.

“I think you see literature often shows us more about a society…than other disciplines can because they can bring in the nuances of life, they can bring in all of the religious and personal and individual overtones that an economic report still cannot bring in…often the nuances, the richness, could not come out any way except in some of these books and novels that I’ve been mentioning. And in the world’s literature—that’s where we’ve learned about societies; that’s where we’ve learned about the way people really live, bring in their values, bring in all of these other aspects that are so important.”

To furnish that belief, she spent the next twenty years in Knoxville, Tennessee, teaching courses in Appalachian literature at the University of Tennessee. In addition to requiring her students to read works by Nikki Giovanni and Thomas Wolfe, she included her own books.

“Your own experience in writing is what, I presume, that they like for you to draw on in teaching writing. I mean, that’s the only way that any of us can really share.”

In addition to her books and teaching, Dykeman wrote short stories and radio scripts, as well as magazine pieces. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, as well as other periodicals, with her most-well known work being the long-running column, “The Simple Life,” which ran in the Knoxville News Sentinel from 1962 until 2000.

To thank Dykeman for her years of work, the Tennessee legislature named her State Historian in 1981. Her passion for state history also led her to push for a Tennessee encyclopedia, which celebrated the state’s bicentennial.

In addition to her other honors, Dykeman received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and sat on several regional boards dealing with conservation, literature, history and women’s issues. She also became a noted public speaker, presenting up to seventy-five speeches a year.

After more than fifty years of writing and motivating the public, Dykeman passed away on December 23, 2006, from complications after a hip surgery. She is buried in Asheville, North Carolina, near the river she helped save.

Clara Cox Epperson was born in 1869 in Gainesboro, Tennessee. She was the daughter of Robert Alexander Cox and Nancy Joseph Draper. Clara Cox received a B.A. degree from Nashville College for Young Ladies in 1887, and an M.A. in 1891. Prior to her marriage to Mr. John Ananius Epperson, she taught school at Dixon Springs and at Gainesboro.

She was a poet and author, and an active member of many local civic and literary organizations, and the Church of Christ. The first Putnam County Library was named in her honor, and she was Poet Laureate of the State of Tennessee for a short time. Her writings and papers are preserved in the Tennessee State Library and Archives. Lottie Farr from the Department of English at Tennessee Technological University collected several of her poems and prose in 1973. Her collection is called Scraps of Verse and Prose from Heartsease in reference to her name for the house she and Mr. Epperson lived in.