The life of Davis Grubb (1919-1980) has cried out for a literary biography for some time, and the obvious person to write it has clearly been Thomas E. Douglass. He is the fiction editor for the University of Tennessee Press’s Appalachian Echoes series and edited reprint editions of both Hawk’s Nest by Hubert Skidmore and Fools Parade by Davis Grubb. A native of West Virginia, Douglass is Professor of English at East Carolina University. He is perhaps best known as the author of the definitive literary biography of Breece D’J Pancake. The subject of this work is Davis Grubb, arguably the most distinguished West Virginia author of his generation. The first of his ten novels, The Night of the Hunter (1953) received both popular and critical acclaim and was made into an iconic Hollywood movie featuring a screenplay by none other than James Agee and starring Robert Mitchum and Shelly Winters.
Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2017. 280 pages with an Index, Bibliography, Notes and two Appendices. Hardback with pictorial cover