Wellspring

Janice Holt Giles

okt. 2014 · University Press of Kentucky

Om den här e-boken

The last book Giles published before her death in 1979, Wellspring has been out of print for years.

The nineteen selections bring together Giles's fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, and fictionalized autobiography to reveal a behind-the-scenes look at her life, her family, her love for her adopted state of Kentucky and its people, her politics, her favorite authors, her thoughts on writing, and her views of her own work. Wellspring is available again for old and new readers of Janice Holt Giles.

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.

Om författaren

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.