During the 1930s and 1940s there were four Appalachian poets who had national reputations. All four published books with New York publishers and published poems in national magazines, and all four had strong rural roots. They were Jesse Stuart (1906-1984) of Kentucky, James Still (1906-2001) of Alabama and Kentucky, Byron Herbert Reece (1917-1958) of Georgia, and George Scarbrough (1915-2008) of Tennessee. George Scarbrough was the third of seven children in a family of sharecroppers in Polk County, Tennessee, the states southeastern most county. He graduated from Lincoln Memorial University in 1947, eighteen years after Stuart and Still did. In 1968 he moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he lived the rest of his life.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Iris Press, a 1999 paperback edition of a 1949 release. 107 pages.