Authors in History

Born in Corinth, Mississippi in 1931, and later moving to Paducah, Kentucky, Knight was one of seven children in a low-income family. Dropping out of school after the eighth grade, he soon realized there were few job opportunities for a young, relatively uneducated black man. His despair led him to drug addiction. In an effort to stop this downward spiral and regain control of his life, Knight joined the Army in 1947 where he served as a medical technician. He was discharged in 1951 after suffering a serious shrapnel wound which left him once again addicted to narcotics. He is often quoted as stating, “I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resurrected me.”

Struggling to support his addiction, Knight turned to crime. He was convicted of robbery in 1960, when he snatched an elderly woman’s purse. He believed his lengthy prison sentence to be unjust and racist. He soon channeled his outrage into poetry, discovering that expressing his feelings through poetry helped him achieve a sense of freedom from the oppression and futility he had felt all his life. He started by reciting “toasts”—long, narrative poems—from memory. However, it was not long before Knight found his own voice and began writing poetry and submitting it for publication. Laika Poetry Review reports that in order “to survive mentally and physically in prison Knight began to record honest depictions of his feelings and reactions to everything around him. The effects were stunning. Feelings of sheer horror and wonder towards the world have rarely been more incandescently burned onto the page in verse form.” He attracted the attention of other great poets such as Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez who were instrumental in securing his parole in 1968.

The publication of his first book, Poems from Prison, coincided with his release which catapulted Knight to the height of the Black Arts Movement. Jean Anaporte-Easton reports in Callaloo magazine that “…success carried Knight forward faster than he was able to move without losing his balance.”

Within a year of his parole, Knight was using heroin again. His personal life suffered and his marriages failed, and he was in and out of rehabilitation centers over the years, but his poetry continued to flourish.

Knight used unique mechanics in his poetry, giving his verse a sense of rhythm that reflected his background with oral tradition. His poems address topics such as racism, slavery, ancestry, and love. He remained a charismatic poetry reader and often read his poems in local bars. Knight states, “If you can stop a man with a full-kidney of beer heading for the men’s room, then you’ve got a good poem.”

Knight wrote his poetry for the common people. He promoted unity in the black community and among the average citizens. Stephen W. Baldwin notes, “Knight transcends racial and economic boundaries by discussing the human spirit’s desire for love, freedom, equality, and culture…[his] poetry touches the soul of the common working class citizen.”

His talents earned him several positions at such prestigious schools as the University of Pittsburgh, University of Hartford, and Lincoln University. In addition, Knight worked as a poetry editor for Motive magazine. He was honored with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972 and 1980, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.

In the late 1970’s, Knight resided in Memphis, Tennessee, where he continued to write poetry while also conducting workshops and collecting “toasts” to be published by the Center for Southern Folklore. He was featured in the Memphis Public Library’s video series, Talking Leaves. In 1980, Knight published Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems, and in 1986, The Essential Etheridge Knight.

Knight received many honors for his poetry including the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in Poetry, and an American Book Award. He also received National Book Award and Pulitzer nominations for his book Belly Song and Other Poems (1973).

Knight began his life as a troubled youth struggling to survive in a tough world. He continued to battle drug and alcohol addiction. However, instead of submitting to the demons that haunted him, he fought to retain control and, in the process, produced some of the most poignant poetry of his time.

Knight succumbed to lung cancer on March 10, 1991, in Indianapolis. But, by his own admission, Knight died several times: “I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.” His voice continues to be heard through his poetry. Laika Poetry Review declares that, “Even though his poems were written decades ago they make vast swathes of contemporary poetry, and indeed hip-hop, sound conservative, toothless, redundant. There are few writers today who can come near his power, his music and his eloquence.”

Richard Marius, historian and novelist, was born in Martel, the son of a Greek father and a Methodist mother from Bradley County. Looking back on his childhood, Marius later identified three elements that contributed to his writing career: a love of the English language, the experiences of a vividly remembered childhood, and his profession as a historian. Among those childhood memories, he recalled his mother reading to him from the Bible and the classics of English and American literature and growing up in rural East Tennessee during the Great Depression and World War II.

After attending public schools in Lenoir City, Marius graduated summa cum laude in Journalism from the University of Tennessee in 1954. He earned his B.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1958), but not finding the ministry to his liking, he took his M.A. (1959) and Ph.D. (1962) from Yale. He taught history at Gettysburg College and the University of Tennessee before becoming director of Expository Writing at Harvard University, where he taught English until his death in 1999.

While at the University of Tennessee, Marius wrote his first novel, The Coming of Rain (1971), a period novel heavy with memory set in fictional Bourbonville in East Tennessee twenty years after the Civil War. In characterization, plot structure, imagery, and pure craftsmanship, The Coming of Rain ranks among the finest novels written by a Tennessean about Tennessee. The author dramatized the work for stage production. Marius followed with Bound for the Promised Land (1976), an episodic novel of a Tennessee man in search of his father in the American West; After the War (1992), set once again in Bourbonville after World War I, with Paul Alexander, a Greek immigrant like Marius’s father, as the protagonist; and An Affair of Honor (1998), also set in Tennessee.

Other writings include Luther (1974), Thomas More: A Biography (1985), The McGraw-Hill College Handbook (with Harvey Weiner, 1984), A Writer’s Companion (1985), and The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry (co-edited with Keith Frome, 1994). His biography Martin Luther (1999) was his last major work. Marius died at Belmont, Massachusetts, on November 5, 1999.

A native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Meacham was an attorney and judge who also wrote novels set in India. Meacham graduated from the University of Chattanooga, where he received his A.B. in 1935, and later attended Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, where he earned his law degree in 1937. Meacham practiced law in Chattanooga from 1937-1972, after which he served as a municipal court judge.

In 1969, Meacham received the Friends of American Writers major award in fiction for The East Indiaman. He is also the namesake of the Meacham Writers Workshop at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, which was founded by his wife, a former UTC professor, in 1985.

Elizabeth Avery Meriwether (1824-1916), Tennessee suffragist, temperance activist, publisher and author, was born in Bolivar on January 19, 1824. Her father, Nathan Avery was a physician and farmer, while her mother Rebecca Rivers Avery was the daughter of a Virginia planter.

Financial problems led the family to move to Memphis around 1835. Nathan’s death in 1846, and Rebecca’s in 1847, caused economic crisis for the siblings. Brother Tom sought outside employment to support his four sisters, and Elizabeth operated a school for some 25 students in the family’s dining room.

In 1852 she married Minor Meriwether, a railroad civil engineer. Carrying out the wishes of Minor’s late father, the couple sold part of Minor’s inherited land to free his slaves and repatriate them to Liberia. She characterized the act as abolitionist, although she later accepted a gift of a household slave from her brother. Both Meriwethers spoke of their marriage as strong and happy. Elizabeth bore three sons: Avery, in 1857; Rivers, in 1859; and Lee (the namesake of General Robert E. Lee), in 1862.

With the onset of the Civil War Minor Meriwether joined the officers corps of the Confederate army. He served with General Nathan Bedford Forrest; Elizabeth was vocal in advocacy of the Confederate cause, and defiant during the Union occupation. General William T. Sherman ordered her to leave Memphis in December 1862, weeks before the birth of her third son. She recounted the experience in her 1863 short story, “The Refugee.”

After the war Minor Meriwether purchased a modest Memphis home for his family on the current site of the Peabody Hotel. He worked with Nathan Bedford Forrest to establish the Ku Klux Klan in Memphis; an early Klan organizational meeting took place in Elizabeth’s kitchen.

Elizabeth Meriwether nettled occupation forces to reinstate the title to her girlhood home, successfully arguing that her 1851 “abolitionist” stand invalidated its seizure. Thus recognized as a property owner and tax payer, she obtained a voter registration in 1872.

She published a small-circulation newspaper, The Tablet, during part of 1872. It featured her unorthodox views on woman suffrage, divorce law, and pay equity for women teachers. In 1876 she made one of the first public suffragist addresses in Memphis. Elizabeth and her sister-in-law, Lide Meriwether championed a number of reform causes. Both were active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and belonged to the National Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth served as a national officer of NAWSA in 1886. She presented unsuccessful suffrage petitions in both the Democrat and Republican national conventions in 1880.

Elizabeth Meriwether’s published writing includes two novels, The Master of Red Leaf (1872) and Black and White (1883), and a play, The Ku Klux Klan, or The Carpetbagger in New Orleans (1877). Non-fiction works include Facts and Falsehoods About the War on the South (1904), published under the pseudonym George Edmonds, and The Sowing of the Swords, or The Soul of the ‘Sixties (1910). An informal memoir, Recollections of 92 Years, was serialized in many Tennessee papers in 1916 and was published by her son Lee in 1958. Meriwether’s writing idealized the Confederate cause and the traditional race ideology of the “Old South.”

Elizabeth Meriwether died in St. Louis on November 4, 1916; several months earlier, each of the major political parties had adopted campaign planks urging passage of a woman suffrage amendment.

Not every true Tennessee author has to be born and bred in the state. Some were raised elsewhere, but stumbled into Tennessee at the prospect of a job or scholarship, and discovered much more about themselves. That is how Jim Wayne Miller found himself in Tennessee.

Miller was born in Leicester, North Carolina, in 1936. He was raised in a rather large family of five younger brothers and sisters. However, the children had plenty of room to roam the family’s seventy-acre farm. His parents were from humble beginnings, working hard to support the large family and to give Miller and his siblings every chance of a good life. Not much is known about Miller’s childhood. What we do know picks up in 1954 when Miller enrolled at Berea College in Kentucky. He became in enthralled with Journalism, German, and English, and studied abroad in Germany during his junior year. Four years after entering Berea, Miller graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism. During this time that he also married fellow Berea coed, Mary Ellen Yates. Shortly after marriage, Miller landed a German and English teaching job in Fort Knox, Kentucky. In 1960 Miller received an NDEA Fellowship to further his studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Once he was a resident of Music City, Miller and his wife became the proud parents of two sons. Literarily speaking, this was also a huge time in Miller’s life: he wrote Copperhead Cane, his first major work. The collection of mountain-oriented poetry was adored by fans and credited by critic Fred Chappell as starting the “Appal-lit movement.” Although short-lived, Miller’s time in Nashville garnered his first, and perhaps, most influential work. By 1963 Miller was dividing his time between teaching at Western Kentucky University and earning his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt. Four years later, Miller was a new father again, this time to a baby girl. Miller continued to teach at Western, supporting his wife as she earned her degree and eventually landed a teaching job alongside him.

In 1971 Miller wrote The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same, a collection of poetic ballads revolving around the mining industry in Kentucky. During the 1980s, Miller found himself conducting numerous academic seminars at the University of Tennessee and Appalachian State University. The arduous drive helped inspire Miller to pen his Nostalgia for 70—a collection of poetry that Miller has said represents “life in the American funhouse.” Having won several awards in his lifetime, such as the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award and the Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature Award, Miller solidified himself as the godfather of Appalachian letters.

Prematurely, lung cancer took his life in 1996, but his legacy is carried on by Western Kentucky’s Jim Wayne Miller Celebration of Writing conference. Hosted annually, it helps to infuse Miller’s joy of teaching and creating literature and pays homage to his Appalachian roots.

Steady rhythm and rules were driving forces not only behind Wilmer Mills’ daily life, but also his poetry, as he thought of “narrative, metrical, old-fashioned poetry as a kind of non-mechanized farming, using outmoded metrical devices to create an organic gardening on the page.”

Mills’ affection for manual labor began in his youth, when his family traveled to Brazil to serve as agricultural missionaries. While there, the family farmed, and Mills thus developed an appreciation for hard work, as well as a slowing-down of time.

Farm life continued for Mills after the family’s return to the United States, as they lived and worked as “his people” have been “since the earliest ones received the land as grants from the king of Spain in 1797,” as he claimed.

Mills credited the agricultural life as his ultimate inspiration, not, “a coup de foudre, a lightning bolt,” or an epiphany “like St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus.”

Despite denying a singular defining moment, Mills did admit to regularly writing down thoughts and images, “never admitting to myself that their lines about deer hunters and pickup trucks could be considered poems. At the time, they were more a means of getting rid of perennial bouts of sadness that overtook me whenever I got a sense of things I didn’t understand, feeling, nevertheless, the weight of their presence.”

Before he put those urges to use in poetry, however, Mills had different artistic ambitions.

“I secretly wanted to be a watercolor painter,” he admitted, after Poetrynet.org named him their July 2006 Poet of the Month. “Technique in that medium, when done well, involves getting a thought or response to nature on paper very quickly and exactly in practiced gestures of the hand.”

However, the impetus to write came in his teen years, when his mother took him to a Robert Penn Warren reading. By the time he reached college at the University of the South, Mills was a voracious reader and writer, and completed his Bachelor of Arts in English in 1992. However, the degree only came after Mills made a serious life decision.

“Conventional, modern farming, as practiced by my father in south Louisiana, was not a viable option for me,” he said. “Farming versus poetry seemed like an either/or proposition. My parents were likely not surprised and perhaps even a little relieved, believing that I would probably become a teacher of some sort to support poetry, and end up better off than they were in agriculture.”

But instead of teaching, Mills supported his family by working as an artisan bread baker, woodworker and a sawmill operator, taking breaks to earn his Master’s degree in theology, and a year to live in France. He and his family also built a bungalow from salvaged building materials, which was featured in a 2007 Southern Living issue.

Mills’ work paid off in 2002, when his first collection, Light for the Orphans, was released to high accolades. Austin MacRae, critic, hailed Mills’ narrative style, which is “predominantly made up of longer narrative pieces and dramatic monologues,” as well as his unusual choice of writing in the third person, and focusing on overlooked members of society, such as the farmers and carpenters he works with daily. True to his temperament, the poems are all precisely metered, and written in blank verse.

Even though Mills’ work frequently bleeds into agricultural territory, he considered himself a poet, not a farmer: “I assuage my guilt about being one of the millions of people who grew up on a farm but didn’t go on to live the life by reminding myself that I am doing what God intended me to do.”