The Plum Thicket

Janice Holt Giles

dek, 2021 · University Press of Kentucky

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Janice Holt Giles had a life before her marriage and writing career in Kentucky. Born in Altus, Arkansas, Giles spent many childhood summers visiting her grandparents there. After the success of her historical novel The Kentuckians in 1953, she planned to write a second frontier romance. But a visit to Altus caused her imagination to drift from Kentucky in 1780 to western Arkansas in 1913.

At age forty-eight—the same age as Giles at the writing of the novel—the heroine Katie Rogers recalls her first visit alone to her grandparent's home in Stanwick, Arkansas. Eight-year-old Katie spends her summer climbing the huge mulberry tree and walking with her wise grandfather, a veteran of bloody Shiloh. She is fascinated, not frightened, by the grave of an unknown child in the nearby plum thicket. Throughout the visit Katie helps Aunt Maggie plan her wedding and looks forward to the three-day Confederate Reunion. But the Reunion—and the summer—end violently, as guilt, repression, and miscegenation are unearthed. "That summer was the end of a whole way of life," Katie realizes, for she can never again dwell in the paradise of childhood.

In Katie Rogers, Giles voiced her own lament for "the beautiful and the unrecoverable past." To her publisher Giles wrote, "Out of my forty-odd years of living, much of whatever wisdom I have acquired has been distilled into this book." This new edition of The Plum Thicket gives Giles's many fans a powerful, moving glimpse into the mind and heart of this beloved author.

Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.

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Author Janice Holt Giles was born in Altus, Arkansas on March 28, 1905. She attended Little Rock Junior College and then the University of Arkansas. She married Otto Moore in 1923; they had one daughter together and divorced in 1939. She worked as a secretary for church congregations and in the field of religious education. She met Henry Giles on a bus in 1943 and they began a two-year courtship, mostly by correspondence because he was serving in World War II. They were married in 1945 and moved to Kentucky in 1949. This is where she started her writing career. Between 1950 and 1975, she wrote twenty-four books of fiction, non-fiction, and short stories mostly concerning Appalachian life and culture. While many authors wrote of desperate mountain communities saved by outsiders, she wrote of desperate outsiders who moved into mountain communities to help others, but found that the people there helped them instead. She also co-wrote some novels with her husband such as Harbin's Ridge. Most of her books were bestsellers, reviewed in the New York Times, and were selected for inclusion in book clubs. She died of heart failure on June 1, 1979.