This book is a historical and cultural interpretation of a symbolic place in the United States, Harlan County, Kentucky, from pioneer times to the beginning of the third millennium, based on a painstaking and creative montage of more than 150 oral narratives and a wide array of secondary and archival matter.

This classic memoir is “an absorbing tale” of life in Appalachian Kentucky during the Great Depression (The Washington Post). G.C. “Red” Jones’s classic memoir of growing up in rural eastern Kentucky during the Depression is a story of courage, persistence, and eventual triumph. His priceless and detailed recollections of hardscrabble farming, of the impact of Prohibition on an individualistic people, of the community-destroying mine wars of “Bloody Harlan,” and of the drastic dislocations brought by World War II are essential to understanding this seminal era in Appalachian history. “An absorbing tale told in the vernacular language of the teamsters, farmers and miners in rural, mountainous Kentucky in the early decades of this century. The narrative flows with the symmetry that comes naturally to the accomplished storyteller.” —TheWashington Post “Draws the reader into a sometimes frightening world of survival.” —Lexington Herald-Leader “He bears witness to Harlan County—first as a community of self-sufficient farmers, then as a mining area and finally in the 1930s as ‘bloody Harlan’ . . . Mr. Jones celebrates horses and mules, the bounty of the hillside farms and woods and the rough ingenuity, honor and sweetness of the mountain people.” —The New York Times “Jones shows all of us that fierce determination, lived day by day, can lead to a satisfying life, even though it might be hard.” —Kentucky Monthly

Harlan County Horrors is a regional based horror anthology by Apex Magazine submissions editor Mari Adkins. It will feature stories by Alethea Kontis, Debbie Kuhn, Earl Dean, Geoffrey Girard, Jason Sizemore, Jeremy Shipp, Maurice Broaddus, Robby Sparks, Ronald Kelly, Stephanie Lenz, Steven Shrewsbury, and TL Trevaskis.

A personal remembrance from the preeminent chronicler of Black life in Appalachia.

Portelli offers a new and challenging approach to oral history, with an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective. Examining cultural conflict and communication between social groups and classes in industrial societies, he identifies the way individuals strive to create memories in order to make sense of their lives, and evaluates the impact of the fieldwork experience on the consciousness of the researcher. By recovering the value of the story-telling experience, Portelli's work makes delightful reading for the specialist and non-specialist alike.

In the 1960's, after graduation from Berea, Lee Pennington went to Harlan County to teach poetry to Kentucky Community College students. Under his tutelage, they published four books of poetry, Spirit Hollow, Thirteen, The Long Way Home and Tomorrow's People. It was this last book that got him in trouble, as the students were honest and frank about their locale, religion and relationships, and local authorities took offense. So much so that a price was put on Pennington's head and he had to leave with armed guards to protect him. This, of course, made national news and he was asked to speak all over the United States. It was not the students or the population of Harlan County who hated Pennington, but the establishment, the executives, the law-enforcers and managers who disapproved of his freedom and honesty. As Jean W. Ross writes in the DLB Yearbook, "the students' work was in part critical of strip-mining, traditional religious teaching, and the hypocrisy of authority." She writes of Lee's subsequent book on the subject, Songs of Bloody Harlan, , published first in North American Mentor (Summer 1971), and in book form in 1975, is Pennington's toughly realistic but ultimately loving tribute to the region that had driven him out in 1967. He wrote of the poetry's genesis, "For two years following my experience in Harlan County, I didn't say anything. But a poet doesn't have that choice either. . . . Songs of Bloody Harlan is my comment." (Jean W. Ross, Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1982, p. 335) Pennington's book, Songs of Bloody Harlan was one of his early publications, with a small edition of 100 printed, in 1975. Its popularity grew until it became very valuable, with a high price of $2,500 listed for one available on Amazon in 2018. This edition fulfills many people's desire to own a copy of this rare book, and it deserves reprinting so that all may partake of the experience Pennington lived, with all of it beauty, love and agony.