Jesse Stuart (1906-1984) was the most popular Kentucky writer of the middle of the 20th Century. In 1930, an unhappy year for Jesse Stuart trying to study at Vanderbilt despite the trials of famine and fire and overwhelmingly comparatively privileged fellow students, he made the decision that he later considered a blight on his name of having a vanity press put out his first poetry book. Only a few copies were printed, and he later tried to round up and destroy every copy he could find. In 1964 the book was reprinted in paperback and in 1998 in hardback by the Jesse Stuart Foundation.
Berea, Kentucky: The Council of the Southern Mountains, 1964. 80 pages with an Introduction by Mace Crandall and a Foreword by Hargis Westerfield. Stiff cardboard cover with a dust jacket.