This book was published from 1913 to 1922. Horace Kephart lived from about 1903-1913 among the "hillbillies" of the southern Appalachian region and had, as he put it, "eighteen years of intimate association with them." He studied their habits, their personalities, and their language. As a result of this firsthand view of them before the intervention of electronic media, his book is perhaps the most definitive description of hillbilly life ever published. It is fascinating reading, having (among others) chapters on bear hunting, moonshining, the mountain dialect, and feuding. "This book deals with the mass of the mountain people. It is not concerned with the reltively few townsmen, and prosperous valley farmers, who owe to outside influences all that distinguishes them from their back-country kinsmen. The real mountaineers are the multitude of little farmers living up the branches and on steep hillsides, away from the main-traveled roads, who have been shaped by their own environment. They are the ones who interest the reading public; and this is as it should be; for they are original, they are 'characters'. . . . The narrative is to be taken literally. There is not a line of fiction or exaggeration in it."
Sadly, the book has its dark side. When he undertook this project, he left a wife and six children. So, as is so often the case, the great man in one field was an abject failure as a family man.
Our Southern Highlanders is in print and available today. I highly recommend it.
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