This is a verbatim copy of the bio sent by Trish Hall, an officer and employee of the Jesse Stuart Foundation with permission to post it on my web site and pass along to others. This is signed by the Author and was taken from an introduction of a book that the Foundation was authorized by Mr. Stuart to publish. Jesse Stuart [Greenup] Jesse Hilton Stuart was born on August 8, 1906, in northeastern Kentucky's Greenup County, where his parents, Mitchell and Martha (Hilton) Stuart, were tenant farmers. Stuart grew up with a strong appreciation for the life lived close to the soil and with a keen awareness of the hardships of rural poverty. Mitchell Stuart could neither read nor write, and Martha had only a second-grade education, but they taught their two sons and three daughters to value education. He graduated from Greenup High School in 1926 and from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, in 1929. He then returned to Greenup County to teach. By the end of the 1930s, Stuart had served as a teacher in Greenup County's one-room schools and as high school principal and county school superintendent. These experiences served as the basis for his autobiographical book, The Thread That Runs So True (1949), called by the president of the National Education Association "the best book on education written in the last fifty years." The book helped to dramatize the need for educational reform in Kentucky. By the time it appeared, Stuart had long since left the classroom to devote his time to lecturing and writing. He returned as a high school principal in 1956-57, taught at the University of Nevada in Reno in the 1958 summer term, and served on the faculty of the American University of Cairo in 1960-61. Stuart began writing stories and poems about the hill people of his section of Kentucky while still a college student. During a year of graduate study at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 1931-32, Donald Davidson, a poet who was one of his professors, encouraged him to continue writing. Following the private publication of Stuart's Harvest of Youth (poems) in 1930, Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow, poems that celebrate his people and the natural world, appeared in 1934 and was widely praised. Mark Van Doren, for instance, called Stuart an "American Robert Burns. His autobiography, Beyond Dark Hills, was published in 1938 and his first novel, Trees of Heaven, in 1940. His first short story collection was Head O' W-Hollow (1936), followed by Men of the Mountains (1941) and by more than a dozen other collections in Stuart's lifetime. His published stories-in magazines and in book form-number more than a dozen novels and autobiographical works. Taps For Private Tussie (1943) is an award-winning satirical look at New Deal relief and its effect on man's self-reliance, and God's Oddling (1960) is a biography of Stuart's father. Stuart's books of poetry also include Album of Destiny (1944) and Kentucky Is My Land (1952). He was designated as a poet laureate of Kentucky in 1954 and was made a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1961. Stuart also lectured widely for many years, particularly on the subject of education and its value, and wrote a number of highly regarded books for children and youth. Prominent among the latter are The Beatinest Boy (1953) and A Penny's Worth of Character (1954). Hie to the Hunters, a novel published in 1950, is a celebration of rural life that has been popular with high school readers. Stuart suffered a major heart attack in 1954. During his convalescence, he produced daily journals that were the basis for The Year of My Rebirth (I956), a book recording his rediscovery of the joy of life. Stuart authorized the establishment of the Jesse Stuart Foundation in 1979. The foundation, headquartered in Ashland, Kentucky, controls the rights to Stuart's literary works and the Jesse Stuart Foundation is reprinting Stuart's many out-of-print works and some of his unpublished manuscripts, too. Stuart died on February 17, 1984, and was buried in Plum Grove Cemetery in Greenup County. Jerry A. Herndon Hall Stuart Hilton Davidson Van_Doren Burns Herndon = NV Cairo-Egypt Nashville-Davidson-TN http://www.rootsweb.com/~kygenweb/kybiog/greenup/stuart.jh.txt