Beyond Dark Hills by Jesse Stuart

First published: 1938

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1907-1937

Locale: Kentucky and Tennessee

Principal Personages:

• Jesse Stuart, a young boy of the Kentucky hills, later a teacher and writer
• Mitchell Stuart, his father
• Martha Hilton Stuart, his mother
• Sophia, ,
• Mary, and
• Glennis, his sisters
• Herbert, ,
• James, and
• Martin, his brothers
• Mitch Stuart, his grandfather

Form and Content

In the depths of the Great Depression, young Jesse Stuart, a 1929 graduate of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, enrolled in Vanderbilt University with the aim of studying under such writers as Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Donald Davidson. Having arrived with little money, Stuart frequently went hungry as he attempted to work his way through graduate school. It was a heartbreaking year. Near its end, in April, 1932, a fire that burned Wesley Hall to the ground destroyed all of his possessions, including his nearly finished thesis on John Fox, Jr. Stuart persevered to the end of the year but then returned to his home, having failed to earn a degree. Yet it was during this year of turmoil that Beyond Dark Hills: A Personal Story, his first autobiographical work, had its genesis.

Professor Edwin Mims had assigned his students of Victorian literature to write an autobiographical paper. Instead of the expected twenty-page paper, Stuart produced more than three hundred typewritten pages in eleven days. Each morning he would show his new copy to Robert Penn Warren, who urged him to “throw everything else aside” until he finished it. Later Stuart recalled, “Blindly I’ve beaten these words out. They fell like drops of blood on the eardrum. I beat them with a hammer and forged them with heat cleavers to make them undouble the small pictures I have gathered in the album of my brain.” A week after he handed it in, Stuart was complimented by Mims, who nevertheless gave him only a C grade in the course. Six years later, the manuscript was published by E. P. Dutton, with two chapters added to chronicle his life at Vanderbilt and thereafter.

To one of his biographers Stuart later explained the book’s alluring title:

I got the title when I was coming up from Portsmouth, Ohio, back to Greenup. At the bend of the river just before you get to Greenup you can see all of Seaton Ridge here spread out before you. I looked up and saw the hills against the sky and they looked dark. I thought, “Beyond those dark hills is my home.”

The book opens with a genealogical chapter, “Tall Figures of the Earth,” with colorful sketches of the Civil War grandfathers of the Stuart and Hilton clans: “On the Stuart side are workers, fighters, heavy drinkers and men of physical endurance. Among the Hiltons are lovers of flashy colors, book readers and people religiously solid as their hills.” Three chapters detail Stuart’s childhood in tenant-farmer cabins, his years in primary school and high school, and his religious insights: “The Destiny of Hills,” “Opossum and Poetry,” and “God: And the Evening Sky.” Venturing beyond the hill farms, he worked first in a carnival and then in the Ashland steel mill. A long chapter chronicles his college years at Lincoln Memorial, where he completed his baccalaureate degree in three years and two summers and was graduated in August, 1929. “Back Drinking Lonesome Water” describes his first year as a teacher in a one-room country school; here Stuart also describes days in court and rural funerals. His year of graduate study at Vanderbilt (1931-1932) is detailed under the heading “A Stranger Was Afraid.” Chapter 10, also added years later to the Mims manuscript, carries the title of his published volume of verse: “Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow.” Stuart’s Vanderbilt professors had counseled him to return home, and that is what he did. Back in eastern Kentucky, he worked as a high school principal and as county superintendent—and he wrote, communicating his love of nature and weaving tales of the struggles of rugged mountain folk. Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow, a volume of verse, was published in 1934. The money it earned enabled Stuart’s father to pay off the farm mortgage and allowed Stuart to buy a bottomland farm so that a road could be built out of W-Hollow. Stuart’s poems celebrating the land had bought him land.

Critical Context

American literature turned toward vernacular writing in the 1930’s, with a surge in “local color” short stories and novels. Collections of such works for college courses in American literature came to include selections from Marjorie Rawlings, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Jesse Stuart. Each reflected the mores and customs of his or her corner of the United States; thus, regionalism explored the pluralism of Americans. Stuart’s biographer, H. Edward Richardson, best summarizes the meld of primitivism, local color, folklore, and regionalism found in Beyond Dark Hills:

My reading of Beyond Dark Hills confirmed my growing impression that Stuart was more than a local colorist. He was a contemporary writer of greater substance to my age than Hamlin Garland or Bret Harte had been to theirs. Here at last, under the charm of his regionalism and the uneven and sometimes impromptu quality of his work, were the deeps of archetypal and mythopoeic patterns: the earth as mother, father, provider; water images unfolding the evolution of primordial man; an abundance of folklore, myths, and tall tales; recurring allegories and symbols from the racial unconscious of mankind; fears and fantasies, mysticism and superstition emerging in nature images; and man in conflict with his own kind.

Unquestionably, Beyond Dark Hills presaged the lifetime writing of the “Poet of the Hills,” who through poetry, short story, biography, autobiography, novels, and public addresses carved a place in world literature for Appalachia and its people. Stuart wanted to be known as a poet; however, most critics found his short stories and novels his best works, while educators and teachers loved his nonfiction works on education and rank them his finest literary monuments.

Stuart’s two most popular books were written and published in the 1940’s: first the novel titled Taps for Private Tussie (1943) and then the tale of his teaching career, titled The Thread That Runs So True. Following a severe heart attack in 1954, he wrote another autobiographical volume about that experience, The Year of My Rebirth (1956).

Before his death in 1984, Stuart’s separately published works totaled sixty-one volumes, including short-story collections, poetry collections, novels, autobiographical books, and several books for children. A descriptive bibliography that lists newspaper and periodical writings as well as longer works has been published in the definitive biography by H. Edward Richardson.

As the first of Stuart’s many autobiographical works, Beyond Dark Hills reflected the ethos and pathos that nearly all of his later works were to celebrate. Critics have observed that Beyond Dark Hills is a work that is greater than the sum of its parts. Threads of style borrowed from Stuart’s Scottish mentor Robert Burns, from Carl Sandburg, and from another Southern author, Thomas Wolfe, have been noted by literary scholars; eventually, Stuart would be censured for stereotyping and perpetuating the hillbilly image of the Appalachian whites. Most serious of the book’s weaknesses is the rather naive Horatio Alger moral implicit in his account of his educational odyssey: that if he could make his way into a better, more modern America, all other hill people could, given decent schooling, do much the same. Ultimately, however, these weaknesses are transcended by the passion and the magnificent vitality of Stuart’s narrative.

Bibliography

Blair, Everetta Love. Jesse Stuart: His Life and Works, 1967.

Clarke, Mary Washington. Jesse Stuart’s Kentucky, 1967.

Foster, Ruel E. Jesse Stuart, 1968.

Le Master, J. R. Jesse Stuart: Kentucky’s Chronicler-Poet, 1980.

Le Master, J. R., and Mary Washington Clarke, eds. Jesse Stuart: Essays on His Work, 1977.

Pennington, Lee. The Dark Hills of Jesse Stuart, 1967.

Richardson, H. Edward. Jesse: The Biography of an American Writer, Jesse Hilton Stuart, 1984.

Spurlock, John Howard. He Sings for Us, 1980.