The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

A tale told from myriad viewpoints follows a family from the Great Depression to the present, describing the experiences of a wild young mountain girl, her protective grandmother, the men who love her, and the children who struggle to manage her legacy.

Having wandered away from her arguing family during a hike on New England's Appalachian Trail, a young girl discovers that she is lost in the menacing woods with only her personal stereo and the Red Sox game for comfort

Smoke to See By is a collection of 21 essays and stories, many never before published, written by award-winning essayist and columnist Ben Moyer. The collection tracks the writer’s quest for intimate knowledge of, and personal connection to, the natural features of his home region, the foothills and ridges of Northern Appalachia. Readers will follow Moyer along mountain streams and through native woodlands to insightful encounters with rare salamanders,...

In early 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy ventured deep into the heart of Eastern Kentucky to gauge the progress of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Author Matthew Algeo meticulously retraces RFK's tour of the region, visiting the places he visited and meeting with the people he met, and explains how and why the region has changed since 1968, and why it matters for the rest of the country.

In 1940, tragedy forces Lou, her little brother Oz, and their invalid mother to move to the mountains of southwestern Virginia to live with their great-grandmother, but a courtroom battle could determine the fates of the entire family.

Every year at Christmas a rich man rides a train through Appalachia and throws gifts to the poor children who are waiting, in order to repay a debt he owes the people who live there.

Haunted by her sister's mysterious disappearance, Lucy Wilson arrives in Rowan County, Kentucky, in the spring of 1911 to work for Cora Wilson Stewart, superintendent of education. When Cora sends Lucy into the hills to act as scribe for the mountain people, she is repelled by the primitive conditions and intellectual poverty she encounters. Few adults can read and write.Born in those hills, Cora knows the plague of illiteracy. So does Brother Wyatt,...

Hillbilly Elegy shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author who is a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past.