Growing Up Hard in Harlan County

Book excerpt: 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