Jesse Stuart: An American Writer 

Written by Michael Lasater

1997 Video documentary 60 minutes

I began work on this documentary in 1995, shortly after moving from Western Kentucky University to join the faculty at Indiana University South Bend. This is the third of my documentaries on writers of the mountain South—Jim Wayne Miller, James Still, and Jesse Stuart. These men knew one another very well. James Still and Jesse Stuart were students together at Lincoln Memorial University. Jim Wayne Miller, a generation younger, was a personal friend of both, and was a major critical resource relating to the work of both. I did not realize at the time I was making this program that I would not work with Jim Miller again; he died in August of 1996, having seen only the opening few minutes of my rough cut. I appreciate the opportunity to have known and worked with him over the span of fourteen years more than I can adequately express.

Additional critical and historical commentary is provided by John Spurlock, Professor of English at WKU, and H. Edward Richardson, Professor of English at the University of Louisville. A most crucial resource was the Jesse Stuart Foundation and its director, James Gifford, who provided me with the many photographs appearing in the documentary, arranged access to sites in Stuart’s W-Hollow home, and granted me permission to present Stuart’s “Split Cherry Tree” illustrated by artist Tom Foster and narrated by actor Warren Hammack.

Copyright 1997 Michael Lasater

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Since February is Black History Month, the Jesse Stuart Foundation has prepared a special display of books that relate to the Underground Railroad.

     The late Poet Laureate of Kentucky, Jesse Hilton Stuart, published 2,000 poems, 460 short stories, and more than 60 books. In addition to being one of Appalachia's best known and most anthologized authors, his works have been translated into many foreign languages.

     Yet his contributions are more than literary. During his life, this charismatic educator and author served as a leader for the people of his mountain homeland and as a spokesman for values like hard work, respect for the land, belief in education, devotion to country, and love of family. His life and works still attract hundreds of tourists to eastern Kentucky every year.

Jesse's highschool photo (on left) his Guggenheim Fellowship photo on the right.

-Jesse Stuart Foundation Archives Department

Jesse Behind the plow.

-Jesse Stuart Foundation Archives

A 1939 photo of the Stuart siblings: Glennis, James, Mary, Jesse, Sophia and parents Martha and Mitch.

 -Voiers Photo Album

Early Life

     Jesse Stuart was born on August 8, 1906, in northeastern Kentucky's Greenup County, where his parents, Mitchell and Martha (Hilton) Stuart, were impoverished tenant farmers. From his father, Stuart learned to love and respect the land. He later became a far-sighted conservationist -- donating over 700 acres of his land in W-Hollow to the Kentucky Nature Preserves System in 1980.

     Mitchell Stuart could neither read nor write, and Martha had only a second-grade education, but they taught their two sons and three daughters to value education. Jesse graduated from Greenup High School in 1926 and from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, in 1929. He then returned to Greenup County to teach.

Jesse working in his bunkhouse after a long day at school.

- Courtesy of the H. Edward Richardson Collection, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville

Dear friends and Associate Members:

Most Jesse Stuart fans know that Harvest of Youth, privately published by Jesse in 1930, was Stuart's first book. His next book was Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow, published in 1934 by E. P. Dutton & Company, a major commercial publishing house. The first printing of the First Edition sold out in less than a month. The success of this Pulitzer-nominated book was the springboard to a great writing career.

However, Between Harvest of Youth and Man With A Bull-Tongue Plow, Stuart wrote a second collection of poetry, Songs of a Mountain Plowman, that was not published until 1986, two years after his death. This is the first book I published when I became Executive Director of the JSF in 1985. Songs was edited and introduced by the late Jim Wayne Miller, a great Appalachian scholar and long-time member of the JSF Board of Directors. Its First Edition of 1000 sold out in the 1980s, and was never republished. It is an important book for Stuart fans who wish to uinderstand Stuart's development as a poet, a great addition to Stuart collection, and an important resource for school and public libraries.

Now, twenty-five years after its first appearance, the JSF plans to re-issue a hardback Special Edition of Songs of a Mountain Plowman that will be designed as a companion to our 2011 reprint of Man With A Bull-Tongue Plow. It will be presented Sepytember 28, 2012 at this year's Jesse Stuart Weekend. This publication will be funded by gifts ffrom friends of the JSF.

Donors will receive recognition in the Acknowledgements section of the book, invitations to book launch events, and a numbered copy of the special edition. Your gift will provide one copy of the book to you and as many as thirty-six copies of the book to libraries. Each gift copy will include a bookplate that identifies you as a donor, if you wish. 

We hope you will join us in reprinting this valuable and interesting book.

   

Sincerely,

James M. Gifford, Ph.D.

CEO and Senior Editor

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The Regional Readers Book Group meets the last Tuesday of the month (except December) at 5:45 pm to discuss a book written by an Appalachian author or a book about Appalachia. Our readers have wide backgrounds and experiences and the discussions are always lively. Come join us! There's no admission fee, and the book prices are discounted to members. The group is open to the public and new members are always welcome.

This months selection:

May 29: 40 Acres and No Mule by Janice Holt Giles

$24.00

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“I think it cannot be denied that for one to become a good writer, one must first become a good reader of a very wide scope of books." -- Allan W. Eckert

Allan W. Eckert was an historian, naturalist, novelist, poet, screenwriter, and playwright. The author of forty published books—plus one, The Infinite Dream, available the fall of 2011 by Jesse Stuart Foundation—he was nominated on seven separate occasions for the Pulitzer Prize in literature and, in 1985, was recipient of an honorary degree as Doctor of Humane Letters from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In 1998 he received his second honorary doctorate, also in Humane Letters, this time from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. In addition to his, he wrote and had published over 150 articles, essays, and short stories, as well as considerable poetry, a major outdoor drama, and screenplays for several movies.

Most noted for his historical and natural history books, Eckert's works have been translated into thirteen foreign languages around the world. A number of his books have been selections of Reader's Digest Condensed Books and several have been major book club selections. The seven of his books that have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature include A Time of Terror: The Great Dayton Flood (history), Wild Season (fiction), The Silent Sky (fiction), The Frontiersmen (history), Wilderness Empire (history), The Conquerors (history), and A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh (biography).

Seven of Allan's books have been nominated for the Pulitzer

Eckert's varied writing includes over 225 performed half-hour television scripts which he wrote for the renowned Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom series and for this writing he received, in 1970, an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in the category of Outstanding Program Achievement. He was playwright of the acclaimed Outdoor Drama entitled Tecumseh! which, in 2011, celebrated its 38th year of production at the multi-million dollar Sugarloaf Mountain Amphitheater near Chillicothe, Ohio. It has been described as the finest outdoor theater production in America. Over that period, the production has been attended by upwards of three million people. For this drama and his other writings, he received from the Scioto Society, in 1987 the Second Annual Silver Arrow Humanitarian Award “for his contributions to the human spirit and knowledge as an author, novelist, playwright, naturalist, and historian.”

Scenes from the Tecumseh! Outdoor Drama in Chillicothe, Ohio

Eckert's best known historical narrative, The Frontiersmen, from which he adapted his Outdoor Drama, Tecumseh!, won the Ohioana Library Association Book-of-the-Year Award in 1968. In that same year, the Chicago-based national literary society, The Friends of American Writers, presented him with its highest award of the year for The Frontiersmen and Wild Season—the first time in that organization's forty-year history of awarding literary prizes that it could not decide between the two books by the same author and therefore awarded him first prize for both. He also received, for his book Incident at Hawk's Hill, the Newbery Honor Book Award, the highest award for juvenile literature in America. Again for Incident at Hawk's Hill, in 1976 he accepted, in person in Vienna, the Austrian Juvenile Book-of-the-Year Award—the first time this prize was ever awarded to a non-Austrian. This same book brought him Best Book of the Year Award from Claremont College in California and it was also made into a two-part television movie by Walt Disney under the title The Boy Who Talked to Badgers. A quarter-century after that book's initial publication, Eckert wrote a sequel entitled Return to Hawk's Hill, which was published in May, 1998.

His widely-acclaimed series of historical narratives entitled The Winning of America consists of six volumes, including The Frontiersmen, Wilderness Empire, The Conquerors, The Wilderness War, Gateway to Empire, and Twilight of Empire. For this series Eckert was presented the Americanism Award by the Daniel Boone Foundation in 1985, and the governor of Kentucky, late in 1987, bestowed upon him the status of honorary resident of that state and conferred upon him its highest honor, commissioning him a bona fide Kentucky Colonel. In 1995, his book That Dark and Bloody River: Chronicles of the Ohio River Valley was named runner-up for the Spur Award of the Western Writers of America. In 1997, Eckert was recipient of the Writer of the Year Award bestowed for his entire body of work by the National Popular Culture Association.

With respect to films, Eckert's book, Incident at Hawk's Hill, was adapted into a two-part television movie in 1974 by Walt Disney Productions. He wrote four screenplays: The Legend of Koo-Tan, Don Meier Productions, 1971; Wild Journey, 1972, Don Meier Production; The Kentucky Pioneers, 1972, Encyclopedia Britannica Production; and George Rogers Clark, 1973, Jerry Bean Production. In recent years Eckert's writings have included a series of children's fantasy adventures which includes two published works—The Dark Green Tunnel and The Wand.

Allan with cast members of Tecumseh! summer of 2010

An esteemed American naturalist, Eckert specialized, in addition to historical writing, in writing about natural history subjects. He had a keen interest in the natural history subjects of geology, entomology, ornithology, herpetology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, mineralogy, and allied fields. Among his important natural history writings are his companion volumes, The Owls of North America and The Wading Birds of North America. He also wrote a series of four volumes, published in 1987 by Harper & Row Publishers, called Earth Treasures—a guide to over 5,000 sites in the contiguous United States where the amateur collector can find excellent minerals, rocks and fossils. His major definitive work on the gemstone opal, entitled The World of Opals was published by John Wiley & Sons in October, 1997. In its review of this book, Lapidary Journal said, “A book that all opal lovers have been waiting for...this is one of the most complete books that has ever been published for any gemstone.”

Allan W. Eckert was born in Buffalo, New York, raised in the Chicago area, graduated (1948) from Leyden Community High School in Franklin Park, Illinois, and, after four years in the United States Air Force, attended the University of Dayton (Ohio) and The Ohio State University. He was founder and chairman of the board of the Lemon Bay Conservancy in Englewood, Florida, an organization which preserves wildlife and estuarial systems, and he was a life member and former trustee of the Dayton (Ohio) Museum of Natural History and, similarly, was a life member of the Mazon Creek Paleontological Society. He was a member of the American Gemcutters Society, and a consultant for La Salla Extension University in Chicago. He also designed and wrote for Writer's Digest magazine their popular correspondence courses entitled The Writer's Digest Course in Article Writing and The Writer's Digest in Short Story Writing.

                             A man of great literary talent, great hair, and the great outdoors - early 80s

                                                                                                     (photograph by Mark Harmel)

In 1999, the Ohioana Library Association, in celebration of its 70th anniversary, invited all Ohioans to vote for their “all time favorite Ohio authors and their books.” Ballots were sent to all public libraries in Ohio and many Ohio newspapers also participated in the event. Eckert's book The Frontiersmen was selected as Ohioans' favorite book “About Ohio or an Ohioan.” Eckert was himself selected as Ohio's favorite author in the category of “About Ohio or an Ohioan,” and in the principal category of “Overall Favorite Ohio Writer of All Time,” the top honor resulted in a tie—shared by Toni Morrison and Eckert.

Since 1967, Eckert has been listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who International, Who's Who in the Midwest, Who's Who in the Southeast, Who's Who in Entertainment as well as in Contemporary Authors, and Something About the Author Autobiography Series.

Allan and his wife, Joan, made their home in Corona, California.

Shortly before Allan's death, he submitted an 1,800 page manuscript for what he called a "two maybe three book project". This work is currently being edited. More information on this at a later date.

• The Writer's Digest Course in Article Writing, Writer's Digest, 1962.
• The Writer's Digest Course in Short Story Writing, Writer's Digest, 1965.
• The Owls of North America: All the Species and Subspecies Described and Illustrated, illustrations by Karl E. Karalus, Doubleday, 1974, new edition, 1975, reprinted as The Owls of North America, North of Mexico: All the Species and Subspecies Illustrated in Color and Fully Described, illustrations by Karalus, Weathervane, 1987.
• The Wading Birds of North America: All the Species and Subspecies Described and Illustrated, illustrations by Karalus, Doubleday, 1979, published as The Wading Birds of North America (North of Mexico), illustrations by Karalus, Weathervane, 1987.
• Earth Treasures: Where to Collect Minerals, Rocks, and Fossils in the United States, Volume 1: The Northeastern Quadrant, Volume 2: The Southeastern Quadrant, Volume 3: The Northwestern Quadrant, Volume 4: The Southwestern Quadrant, Perennial Library, 1987.
• The World of Opals, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997

• The Dreaming Tree, Little, Brown, 1968.
• The HAB Theory (science fiction), Little, Brown, 1976. eBook edition by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2011.
• The Scarlet Mansion, Little, Brown, 1985. eBook edition by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2011.
• Return To Hawk's Hill:  A Novel, Little, Brown, 1998.

Documentary Fiction

• The Great Auk (Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club selection), Little, Brown, 1963. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation as The Last Great Auk, 2003.
• The Silent Sky: The Incredible Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, Little, Brown, 1965.
• Wild Season, Little, Brown, 1967.
• Bayou Backwaters, Doubleday, 1968.
• The Crossbreed (Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club selection), Little, Brown, 1968.
• In Search of a Whale, Doubleday, 1970.
• The Court-Martial of Daniel Boone, Little, Brown, 1973. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2005.
• Johnny Logan: Shawnee Spy, Little, Brown, 1983. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2010.
• Opals, John Wiley and Sons (New York City), 1997.

• A Time of Terror: The Great Dayton Flood, Little, Brown, 1965.
• The Frontiersmen ("Winning of America" series), Little, Brown, 1967. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2001. eBook edition by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2011
• Wilderness Empire ("Winning of America" series), Little, Brown, 1969. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2001.
• The Conquerors ("Winning of America" series), Little, Brown, 1971. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2002.
• The Wilderness War ("Winning of America" series), Little, Brown, 1978. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2003.
• Gateway to Empire ("Winning of America" series), Little, Brown, 1982. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2004.
• Twilight of Empire: A Narrative ("Winning of America" series), Little, Brown, 1988. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2004.
• A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh, Bantam, 1992, limited edition published as Sorrow of the Heart: The Life of Tecumseh, 1992.
• That Dark and Bloody River: Chronicles of the Ohio River Valley, Bantam, 1995.
• Dark Journey, Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2009.
• The Infinite Dream, Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2011.

• The King Snake (nature novel), Little, Brown, 1968.
• Blue Jacket: War Chief of the Shawnees, Little, Brown, 1969. Reprinted by Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2004.
• Incident at Hawk's Hill (novel; Reader's Digest Condensed Book Club selection), Little, Brown, 1971.
• Savage Journey (novel), Little, Brown, 1979.
• Song of the Wild (novel), Little, Brown, 1980.
• Whattizzit? Nature Pun Quizzes, Landfall Press, 1981.
• The Dark Green Tunnel ("Mesmerian Annals" series), Little, Brown, 1984.
• The Wand: The Return to Mesmeria, ("Mesmerian Annals" series), Little, Brown, 1985.

• Tecumseh! (play), Little, Brown, 1974.  http://www.tecumsehdrama.com/
• Author of more than 200 television scripts for Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (1963 – 1988).  http://www.wildkingdom.com
• Author of screenplays including The Legend of Koo-Tan, 1971, Wild Journey, 1972, The Kentucky Pioneers, 1972, and George Rodgers Clark, 1973.
• Contributor of more than 200 articles to periodicals.

Jesse Stuart Weekend is Sept. 28 - 29, 2012 

at Greenbo Lake State Resort Park.

Make your reservations now by calling

800.325.0083

We hope you will make plans to attend the 2012 Jesse Stuart Weekend, September 28-29 at Greenbo Lake State Resort Park. The weekend is dedicated to the works and memory of the former Kentucky poet laureate, who was born in Greenup County, worked as an educator and became known for his poems, short stories, and novels.

A detailed agenda will be provided in our spring 2012 issue of the JSF Newsletter

or you can check back here at that time! 

To make room reservations for Jesse Stuart Weekend contact the Greenbo Lake State Resort Park at 606.473.7324 or 800.325.0083. Greenbo Park is located on KY 1, 18 miles north of I-64 from Grayson exit or 8 miles south of U.S. 23, the Country Music Highway on KY 1. Greenbo Lake features the Jesse Stuart Lodge with 36 rooms, convention center, and Anglers’ Cove Restaurant. The park has a 225-acre lake for boating and fishing, tennis courts, 25 miles of multi-use trails for hiking, biking and horseback riding. The campground is open April 1 through Oct. 31. Greenbo Amphitheatre features musical concerts and plays during the summer and fall. For more information on Kentucky parks, visit http://www.parks.ky.gov.

Until next year you can enjoy these scenes from past Jesse Stuart Weekends 

(A Special JSF Thank-you to Bud Vanzant for supplying the photos)

More to come . . .