Their Ancient Grudge by Harry Harrison Kroll

Three of the dominant authors of the first generation of native Appalachian writers - James Still, Jesse Stuart, and Don West - all graduated from Lincoln Memorial University at Cumberland Gap, and all left LMU for Vanderbilt for additional study. The faculty member at LMU who arguably influenced each of them the most was Harry Harrison Kroll (1888-1967) . His advice was to write about the culture they knew, and they all followed that advice. True, James Still also identified with the more traditional professors there, and his work reflects a more refined literary sensibility, but he did wrote about the mountain people around him. Kroll grew up in a sharecroppers family in the Deep South, and his books appealed to the celebration of the working class that attracted many 1930s intellectuals. Most of his academic career was at the University of Tennessee at Martin in West Tennessee. He published more than 25 books. This is a novel portraying the Hatfield-McCoy feud (1878-1890) through th