Melissa Duke Mooney lived in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and two children. She worked as a publicist and led many community volunteer projects in her neighborhood of East Nashville. She was the author of one book for children, The ABCs of Rock, an abcdarian with illustrations by Louisville, Kentucky-based Print Mafia. The book features prominent rock ‘n’ roll acts for each letter of the alphabet.
Austin Merrill Moore was born on September 11, 1903, in Columbia, Tennessee, to parents John and Mary. Moore credited his father, who was also a Tennessee poet, as his earliest literary influence. He had strong Southern values and ties. His grandfather was a captain in the Confederate army and his father was the Tennessee director of libraries, archives, and history for ten years, after which his wife Mary assumed the post.
Moore attended Montgomery Bell Academy, and it was during this time that his aptitude for sonnets was discovered by Isaac Ball. Despite his father urging him to work as a journalist he opted for medical school.
Moore earned his Bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt University in 1924 and a Medical Doctorate in 1928. Starting with the second issue of The Fugitive, Moore published a total of sixty-two poetic pieces in its pages, forty-six of them sonnets. The remaining were short lyrical pieces, all published under Moore’s pseudonym, “Dendric.” Moore said of his fellow Fugitives, “We all influenced each other; we all rubbed the edges off each other and knocked sparks out of each other in a peculiar way.”
In 1929, shortly after his father’s passing, Moore accepted a position at Boston City Hospital. Later, while in private practice, he taught at the prestigious Harvard Medical School. He served in a medical capacity in the U.S. Army during WWII both in New Zealand and the South Pacific and earned a Bronze Star and an Army Commendation medal.
Moore married Anne Nichols in 1930 and the couple had four children: Adam, John, Leslie, and Hester. During the decade following his graduation, he published three books of poetry and 1,400 individual poems in addition to many articles in medical and psychiatric journals. He was known as something of an expert in the fields of alcoholism and suicide, having researched both extensively.
Robert Frost said of Moore: “Serious physician and serious artist, he had no notion of being taken lightly; still there was something of the rogue there that was a part of his great charm. He seldom cracked a smile.” Merrill Moore died of cancer on September 20, 1957, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Though many do not know much about Mary Noailles Murfree, several scholars find it hard to discuss Southern literature without her; she is in fact labeled “Tennessee’s foremost woman writer of fiction” on a historical landmark in Murfreesboro. She is one of the top local color fiction writers of the Smokey Mountain region, and though her works have mixed reviews and her reputation is somewhat low, she still holds a place in the state’s literary history.
Murfree’s family name is one easily recognized by many Tennesseans; her great-grandfather Colonel Hardy Murfree is the one for whom Murfreesboro was named. Both her father and mother encouraged intellectual growth in their daughter, and after a fever left her partially paralyzed when she was four, she found that she enjoyed staying home and reading—more than she did playing with other children. Though born in Murfreesboro, the family moved to Nashville when Murfree was seven, and she began attending the Nashville Female Academy. The family owned a resort in Beersheba (near McMinnville), and every summer for about fifteen years they went there to relax and soak in the hot mineral springs. In 1867, Murfree enrolled in the Chegary Insitute, a women’s “finishing school” in Philadelphia, where she realized her love for poetry and music.
Soon the family settled in St. Louis, and Murfree began writing. Her satirical essays “Flirts and Their Ways” and “My Daughter’s Admirers” were published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1874. She was afraid that being a woman would interfere with her literary success, so she made these essays under the male pseudonym R. Emmett Dembry. Her first two stories were accepted by Appleton’s Weekly in 1876, but the magazine cancelled publication entirely before the stories appeared. Then in 1878, the Atlantic Monthly published her story, “The Dancin’ Party at Harrison’s Cove,” which was under the pen name that stuck: Charles Egbert Craddock. Murfree’s first book, a collection of stories called In the Tennessee Mountains, was published in 1884, and later that year, she published her first novels, Where the Battle Was Fought and The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains. All of these works were under the name of Craddock.
However, Murfree’s secret was soon revealed. She was asked to meet with her publishers in Boston, who only knew her as M. N. Murfree. In 1885, her sister, father, and she surprised the editor of Atlantic Monthly when he saw that Mr. Craddock was actually a Miss Murfree. As her work began to grow, so did her reputation. It’s even said that there was a time when President Theodore Roosevelt visited Murfreesboro and shouted from a train platform, “Where’s Craddock? She’s the person I want to see!”
The time was right for Murfree’s writing; America’s horizons were expanding, and people were curious about unfamiliar areas—like the mountains of Tennessee. Local color fiction (that is, literature that focuses on the culture of a certain region) was becoming a popular genre, and Murfree was fitting right into the fad. She knew a lot about life in the Appalachians because of her many summers spent in Beersheba; she was able to contribute a lot of valuable material to interested readers. She wrote 25 novels in all, most of which focused on mountain life, Tennessee history, and Cherokee culture. Murfree well-represented the mountaineer lifestyle through her rich description and her use of dialect, and many reviewers enjoyed the genuine nature of her depiction of the exotic yet ordinary mountain people. Reviewers compared her to her contemporary local color fiction writers such as Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, George Washington Cable, and Joel Chandler Harris.
Murfree also had her critics. Many people see her narration as too far detached from her dialogue; it is unusual to read passages like “domestic difficulties might have proved efficacious but for the shakiness induced by the thrill of fraternal settlement” (“The Star in the Valley”) in conjuction with dialogue that reads “‘Yer wheat looks likely; an’ yer gyarden truck air thrivin’ powerful’” (“The ‘Harnt’ that Walks Chilhowee”). Some critics think that Murfree’s writing reads too much like an over enthused tourist rather than an inhabitant of the mountains. Even Mark Twain referenced Murfree in an appendix to one of his novels as an example of overblown writing.
Because of her negative reviews and because she is one among many in the local color fiction movement, Murfree often gets overlooked. Many of her works aren’t readily available; she is rarely anthologized, scholars don’t usually research her, and several of her books for classroom settings are overpriced. Even sometimes when historians rather than literarians study Murfree’s work, they scrutinize it. It’s been speculated that feminists would help Murfree’s reputation grow, but because Murfree doesn’t have many strong female characters, she is often overlooked by that crowd as well.
By the end of the century, when the fad of local color fiction was dying, Murfree appealed to the next literary craze: historical fiction. Though she turned out two novels and two short stories between 1908 and 1914, it is the consensus that Murfree’s best work was her earliest.
Though she struggled with lameness her entire life due to the fever that struck her at four years old, it impaired her more as she grew older. Eventually, her condition became chronic, and she was blind. When she died in 1922, her reputation was so defeated that her obituary was nothing more than four lines on the bottom of the seventeenth page in the New York Times.
Perhaps Murfree’s reputation will be revived through studies of American, Southern, and Feminist literature. Whether this happens or not, the life and works of Mary Noailles Murfree have made history in Tennessee for her contribution of Appalachian lifestyle to the local color fiction movement. She left the legacy of not only the name of Murfree in a quickly growing town south of the state’s capital, but she also shed light on the mysterious Appalachian mountain region and paved the way for Southern women writers.
Edd Winfield Parks was a native Tennessean who spent many years as a literary scholar and a professor at the University of Georgia. He was born in Newbern, Tennessee in February 1906. He earned his Associates degree (1927) from Harvard and received his M.A. (1929) and Ph.D. (1933) at Vanderbilt University. He taught briefly at Vanderbilt and later Cumberland University before taking a permanent position at the University of Georgia. He began teaching English in 1935. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Parks focused on Southern society, literature, and poetry. In 1933, he married Alice Aileen Wells, who worked at the Ward-Belmont School for Young Women and later wrote children’s books.
In 1942, he volunteered for the Armed Services and served a Captain of Army Intelligence. When the war concluded, Parks rejoined the University of Georgia in the late 1940s. Much of his work emerged in the 1950s and 1960s: two fiction books, Backwater (1957) and Nashoba (1963); several non-fiction works, which included William Gilmore Sims as Literary Critic (1961), Edgar Allen Poe as Literary Critic (1964), Henry Timrod (1964), Thomas MacDonagh: The Man, the Patriot, the Writer (with Aileen Wells Parks, 1967), and Sidney Lanier: The Man, the Poet, the Critic (1968); a number of young adult and children’s books, such as Safe on Second: The Story of a Little Leaguer (1953), Teddy Roosevelt, All-Round Boy (1953), and Teddy Roosevelt, Young Rough Rider (1953).
Parks was a visiting professor for several institutions outside of the United States. He spent a considerable time on a Fullbright Fellowship at the University of Brazil, and he lectured at numerous other colleges in Venezuela, Denmark, Norway, and Finland. During his career he served as a Carnegie fellow, a Fulbright lecturer, Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor of English at UGa and president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. Parks died in 1968, and his wife died in 1986.
Episcopal Bishop Charles T. Quintard was born in Stamford, Connecticut, the son of Isaac Quintard and Clarissa Hoyt. In 1847 he received his medical degree from University Medical College, New York University, and worked for a year at Bellevue Hospital. About a year later, he moved to Athens, Georgia, and practiced medicine there. In 1851 Quintard became professor of physiology and pathological anatomy at the Memphis Medical College and one of the editors of the Memphis Medical Reporter. While in Memphis, Quintard studied for the ministry of the Protestant Episcopal Church under Bishop James Otey and was ordained deacon on January 1, 1855, and priest on January 6, 1856. He was rector of the Church of the Advent, Nashville, until he was consecrated the second Bishop of Tennessee on October 11, 1865. He served in that position until his death in 1898.
During the Civil War, Quintard was a chaplain for the Confederate army. He also worked as a surgeon. As bishop he was instrumental in the revival of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Tennessee and extended its ministry to blacks. He was deeply interested in education and supported the founding of a number of preparatory schools. His greatest contribution to education was in rebuilding the University of the South after the devastation of the Civil War; he served as the first vice-chancellor of the University, February 14, 1867-July 12, 1872. Quintard made several trips to England to raise money for the University.
In 1848 Quintard married Katherine Isabella Hand of Roswell, Georgia, and they had three children.
Printer, writer and humorist, Opie Read was a popular novelist and short story writer. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but lived for most of his professional life in Chicago, Illinois. Read attended Neophogen College in Gallatin, Tennessee. Before moving to Illinois, he was the editor of the Statesville Argus (KY), the Bowling Green Pantograph, the Courier-Journal (Louisville), the Evening Post (Little Rock), the Gazette (Little Rock), and the Arkansas Traveler.
