Numerous exceptional writers have called Kentucky home. Created in 2012 by Lexington’s Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning to recognize authors “whose work reflects the character and culture” of the Commonwealth, the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame has honored 33 writers since its inception.
This year, the Hall of Fame committee has selected four writers whose work spans from the 19th century to the present day. The 2018 inductees are bell hooks, John Fox Jr., Annie Fellows Johnston and Walter Tevis.
bell hooks 1952 -
Author bell hooks has spent a lifetime deriving what is needed to bridge cultural, gender and racial divides. Her mission has been to develop constructs where scholars, activists and readers can accomplish this. She has brought to the forefront how we talk about race.
Born Gloria Jean Watkins on Sept. 25, 1952, hooks was raised in rural Hopkinsville. She says her neighborhood was a world where folks were content to get by on a little; where her maternal grandmother made soap, dug fishing worms, set traps for rabbits, made butter and wine, sewed quilts and wrung the necks of chickens. She believes her home community turned the hardships created by racial segregation and racism into a source of strength.
Hooks is one of six siblings—five daughters and a son. Her father, Veodis Watkins, was employed as a janitor, and her mother, Rosa Bell Oldham Watkins, worked as a maid in the homes of white families. Hooks was taught in a segregated school by strong teachers, mostly single black women, who helped to shape the self-esteem of children of color. By the time she was 10, hooks had begun writing her own poetry and soon developed a reputation for her ability to recite poetry.
She developed a strong sense of self that allowed her to speak out against racism and sexism. She is a poet, a fictionist and is perhaps best known as a writer of critical essays on systems of domination.
After high school, hooks accepted a scholarship to Stanford University in California. During her college years, she began Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which examines how black women throughout modern history have been oppressed by white men, black men and white women. Published in 1981, the book became central in discussions of racism and sexism. Eleven years later, Publishers Weekly ranked it among the “20 most influential women’s books of the previous 20 years.”
In 1973, hooks obtained a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford University, and in 1976, she earned a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She completed her doctorate in literature in 1983 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison.
After holding positions at the University of California in Santa Cruz in the early 1980s, hooks left for Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where she taught African-American studies. In 1988, she joined the faculty at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she taught women’s studies. In 1995, she accepted a post with the City College of New York. She currently serves as Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College in Berea.
It is in her role as a teacher that hooks feels she is doing her most important work. She knows that, for a people historically and legally denied the right to education, teaching is one of the most substantial forms of political resistance she could choose.
Hooks’ awards include: Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award (1991) for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics; the Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Fund’s Writer’s Award (1994); a nomination for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Image Award (2001) for Happy to Be Nappy; Bank Street College’s Children’s Book of the Year designation (2002) for Homemade Love; and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nomination (2002) for Salvation: Black People and Love.
Hooks remains an important figure in the fight against racism and sexism in America. To date, she has published 34 books. She remains active as a speaker and mentor, particularly in the collegiate setting.
John Fox Jr. 1862 - 1919
Harriet Holman in her Southern Literary Journal article, “John Fox, Jr. Appraisal and Self-Appraisal,” wrote that once Kentucky’s local color writer, John Fox Jr., became an established author, magazine editors bought everything he offered them. A remarkable fact of Fox’s literary career is that he never had a manuscript rejected. Equally remarkable is that he published two of the first million-selling novels in the United States.
John William Fox was born Dec. 16, 1862 at Stony Point in Bourbon County, 7 miles east of Paris, in the heart of the Bluegrass. His mother was Minerva Carr. His father, John W. Fox, was headmaster of the Stony Point Academy, which John Jr. attended from 1867 to 1875. The Fox family was well-known and close-knit. John had four full brothers and two sisters, and three half-brothers from his father’s first wife, who died in childbirth. After attending Transylvania University for two years, he entered Harvard University in 1880 to study English, graduating cum laude in 1883 as the youngest member of his class.
After college, Fox moved to New York City, where he worked as a journalist with The New York Sun and The New York Times. During his time in New York, Fox met Fritzi Scheff, a prima donna with the Imperial Opera of Vienna, who was performing with the New York Metropolitan Opera. She later would become his wife.
Upon James Lane Allen’s recommendation, Fox submitted his first novella, A Mountain Europa, to The Century Magazine, which published it serially, followed by A Cumberland Vendetta a year later. The mountaineer theme would be repeated in his future works. A Cumberland Vendetta and Other Stories (1895) was his first published collection of short stories, followed by Hell Fer Sartain and Other Stories (1897) and The Kentuckians (1897). After his fame began to grow, his new home attracted illustrious visitors, including future President Theodore Roosevelt, who became his lifelong friend. They met after he was sent to Cuba by Harper’s Weekly in 1898 as a war correspondent covering the Spanish-American War. While there, he served with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
As a result of the popularity of Fox’s Century publications and his successful publishing with Harper & Brothers and Scribner, he launched a lecture circuit, traveling in Europe and America, including visits to President Roosevelt’s White House, where he sang mountain songs and read from his own works.
His novel, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, was released in 1903 and became the first novel printed in the United States to sell a million copies. In 1904, Fox was sent as a war correspondent to Japan and Manchuria to cover the Russo-Japanese War. That experience resulted in the publication of Following the Sun-flag: A Vain Pursuit Through Manchuria (1905).
His popular coming-of-age novel, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, was released in 1908. It is the tale of the engineer Jack Hale, an “outsider” who falls in love with June Tolliver, a native of the mountains. The book became the first novel printed in the U.S. to sell 2 million copies.
The same year that The Trail of the Lonesome Pine was released, Fox married Fritzi Scheff. The tempestuous marriage lasted five years, ending in divorce in 1913.
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine are arguably Fox’s best-known and most successful works. He was on The New York Times’ top 10 list of bestselling novels for 1903, 1904, 1908 and 1909. In 1916, Cecil B. DeMille wrote, directed and produced a film version of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Other versions appeared in 1923 and 1936.
Fox traveled widely, counting among his friends other popular writers, such as Richard Harding Davis, Jack London and Booth Tarkington. He was awarded many honors in his lifetime, including election to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1899 and a medal for his literary contributions from the Emperor of Japan. His dedication and lobbying led to the passing of the Federal Copyright Act.
Fox died July 8, 1919 of pneumonia at Big Stone Gap, Virginia and is buried in Bourbon County’s Paris Cemetery.
Annie Fellows Johnston 1863 - 1931
Kentucky author Annie Fellows Johnston received widespread fame and popularity from the late 19th century into the early 20th century as a prolific author of books for children. The Little Colonel series, her 13-book collection beginning with The Little Colonel (1895), was widely read. She authored more than 50 books and contributed short stories to periodicals such as The Youth’s Companion, Godey’s Lady’s Book, St. Nicholas Magazine and others. She also had two other series: The Cosy Corner series of 10 books and The Jewel series of seven books. Boston publisher L.C. Page issued most of her books.
In the flyleaf of her book, The Land of the Little Colonel: Reminiscence and Autobiography (1929), The Boston Transcript described Johnston as “a rare gift in producing little stories in the nature of allegories full of spiritual significance and beauty … the most gifted and the most helpful of present-day writers for young people.”
Her work is now considered anachronistic, depicting Reconstruction Era South still transitioning from the Civil War, and must be taken in the context of the times. In her 1991 Register of the Kentucky Historical Society article, “The Little Colonel: A Phenomenon in Popular Literary Culture,” Sue Lynn Stone McDaniel characterizes Johnston’s writing as having led several generations of impressionable young readers to idealize the Old South and accept selfless values, which she taught through The Little Colonel series.
Most of Johnston’s characters and settings are said to depict real places, people and life experiences and are primarily set in a fictionalized Pewee Valley she called Lloydsboro Valley.
Born Annie Julia Fellows in 1863, she grew up with her mother, Mary Erskine Fellows, brother Erwin and two sisters, Lura and Albion, on a farm in McCutchanville, Indiana, near Evansville. Her father, Albion, a Methodist minister, died when she was 2. Annie began writing poems and short stories as a young girl. She was a voracious reader and was said to have read every book in her Sunday school library. She attended district school and, upon graduating at 17, taught there briefly.
Annie attended the University of Iowa for one year (1881-82). She returned to Evansville, where she taught three years before taking a job as a private secretary. She then traveled for several months through New England and Europe, and the influence of these trips appeared later in many of her works. Upon returning, she married her cousin, a widower, William L. Johnston, who had three young children. He was supportive of her writing. William died in 1892, leaving Annie a widow with his children to support. It was at that time that she began her career as a writer.
Johnston moved to Pewee Valley in 1898. She loved the leisurely pace and aristocratic lineage of its people. But shortly, she was beset by tragedy. In 1899, her stepdaughter, Rena, died, and the health of her stepson, John, deteriorated. In 1901, she took John west to a more favorable climate—first to Arizona, then California and then Texas. He died in 1910. From 1904-1910, she wrote four books set in the Southwest and four books in continuation of The Little Colonel series.
In 1910, Johnston returned to Pewee Valley and published five books. She lived there until her death in 1931. In 1935, 20th Century Fox released The Little Colonel, a film with Shirley Temple starring as the Little Colonel. Lionel Barrymore played the part of the Old Colonel.
From 1895-1914, Johnston published at least one book per year, and in 14 of those years published multiple books. Her most productive year was 1904, when she published four books.
She is buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Evansville, Indiana.
Walter Tevis 1928 - 1984
Famed crime writer and literary critic James Sallis wrote in the Boston Globe that Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earth was “among the finest science fiction novels …” He labeled it as a Christian parable and a portrait of the artist, describing it as one of the most heartbreaking books he had encountered. He called it “a threnody on great ambition and terrible failure, and an evocation of man’s absolute, unabridgeable [sic] aloneness.”
Tevis was born in San Francisco in 1928 and lived there for the first decade of his life. He developed a rheumatic heart condition, so his parents placed him in the Stanford Children’s Convalescent home in California for a year. During that time, they returned to Kentucky, where the Tevis family had been given an early land grant in Madison County. At 11, Walter traveled alone cross country by train to rejoin his family in Kentucky. He made friends with Toby Kavanaugh, a fellow Lexington High School student. Tevis learned to shoot pool in the recreation room of the Rhoda Kavanaugh Mansion in Lawrenceburg and began to read science fiction books in the library there. Tevis and Kavanaugh remained lifelong friends.
Kavanaugh later became the owner of a pool room in Lexington, which would have an impact on Tevis’ writing.
At 17, Tevis became a carpenter’s mate in the United States Navy, serving on board the USS Hamul in Okinawa. After his discharge, he attended the University of Kentucky, where he studied with Pulitzer Prize-winner A.B. Guthrie, author of The Big Sky, and received both a bachelor’s degree (1949) and master’s degree (1954) in English literature. While a student at UK, Tevis worked in his friend Kavanaugh’s pool hall, wrote his first “pool hall” story, “The Big Hustle,” for Guthrie’s class and had it published in the Aug. 5, 1955 issue of Collier’s magazine.
Upon graduation, Tevis taught everything from the sciences and English to physical education in small-town Kentucky high schools, including Science Hill, Hawesville, Irvine and Carlisle. He also taught at Northern Kentucky University, the University of Kentucky and Southern Connecticut State University. He later attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received a master of fine arts degree in creative writing in 1960.
Tevis published his first science fiction short story, “The Ifth of Oofth,” in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1957. He married Jamie Griggs the same year, and they remained together for 27 years. They had a son, William Thomas, and a daughter, Julia Ann. He continued to publish, with his short stories appearing in The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Redbook, Cosmopolitan and Playboy. His first novel, The Hustler, was published in 1959 by Harper & Row, followed by The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1963 by Gold Medal Books.
He taught English literature and creative writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for 14 years, but he published little while there. He left that post in 1978 to go to New York and resume writing, penning four more novels—Mockingbird, The Steps of the Sun, The Queen’s Gambit and The Color of Money. Additionally, he published Far From Home (1981), a collection of short stories. Tevis’ popular works were translated into nearly 20 languages. He was also a nominee for science fiction’s Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1980 for Mockingbird.
Three of Tevis’ six novels were the basis for major motion pictures. The Hustler (1961) and The Color of Money (1984) followed the escapades of fictional pool hustler “Fast Eddie” Felson. The Man Who Fell to Earth was released in 1976 and subsequently was remade in 1987 as a TV film.
Tevis spent his last years in New York City, where he died of lung cancer in 1984. He is buried in the Richmond Cemetery in Madison County.