On January 30, 1979, 130 million people tuned in to watch the conclusion of the ABC miniseries Roots. For eight consecutive nights, viewers had been enthralled by the story of a slave, Kunte Kinte, from his abduction in West Africa, up through his death on an American plantation. The real-life story of Roots eventually led…
Henry Sydnor Harrison was born in Tennessee, graduated from Columbia, and served on the staff of the Richmond Times‐Dispatch (1900–1910). His later life was devoted mainly to fiction, the best of his seven novels being Queed (1911) and V.V.’s Eyes (1913). The first, dramatized by Gilbert Emery (1921), is a complacently realistic story of American…
Author of stories of mountain life, Mildred E. Haun was born in Hamblen County, on January 6, 1911, to James Enzor and Margaret Ellen Haun, but was raised in Haun Hollow in the Hoot Owl District of Cocke County in a large family of strong, independent mountain farmers whose roots could be traced back to…
Bowen Ingram was the pen name for Mildred Rebecca Prewett Ingram, who was born in Gordonsville, a town named for her ancestor, John Gordon. Always interested in writing, Ingram published her first poem at age 12. She married Daniel Taylor Ingram, Commandant of Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, and began to write for publication…
Two mysteries surround the life and career of Randall Jarrell: how he was able to accomplish so much in half a century, and whether or not his death at age fifty-one was accident or suicide. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Owen and Anna Campbell Jarrell, the family moved to California when Randall was only a…
May Justus’s stories revolve around her mountain heritage and upbringing. Such stories as “The House in No-End Hollow” and “Dixie Decides” evoke the same rustic childhood that she experienced in rural Tennessee in the early 1900s. Justus was born on May 12, 1898, in Del Rio, Tennessee. Her father was a schoolteacher, and the family…
