Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia has recently been republished in a special 25th anniversary edition. Edited by retired ETSU English professors Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose N. Manning, the 562-page anthology includes a new foreword by the editors and an afterword by the late Jim Wayne Miller, a noted Appalachian poet who taught German at Western Kentucky University.
The first edition of the book, published in 1975 by Frederick Ungar, Inc. and the Appalachian Consortium Press, became the most widely used textbook on Appalachian writing in America’s schools and colleges. The 25th anniversary version was published by Kendall/Hunt of Dubuque, Iowa.
“Much has changed in the region and the world in the last quarter of a century,” Higgs and Manning write in the foreword. “The cost of the first edition, for example, was $3.75 for a book 540 pages long!”
There are many more texts about Appalachian literature and culture than were available in 1975, and Appalachian Studies Programs have grown by leaps and bounds, including the establishment of new centers for the study of the region.
“At the same time much of the discussion about the region remains the same, especially two issues with which the book concerned itself from the start: What is Appalachia? and What is Appalachian Literature?”
In 1995, Higgs, Manning, and Miller published a two-volume sequel to Voices from the Hills, called Appalachia Inside Out (The University of Tennessee Press). According to Miller, in the afterword to the new Voices from the Hills, “Appalachia embodies much of our living past and with its resources of coal, oil, gas and water, the region is certain to become increasingly important to the nation’s future.”
Readings in the book include first impressions of Appalachia collected from diaries and letters; early descriptions of Native American life; backwoods humor from David Crockett and Mark Twain; local color from Southwest Virginian John Fox Jr.; selections from novelists Thomas Wolfe, James Agee, and Wilma Dykeman; and 13 mountain poems.
The second half of the anthology is entitled Echoes and Reverberations: Essays in Criticism and Culture and includes an essay by Theodore Roosevelt on the Watauga Settlement in Northeast Tennessee, as well as writings by Robert Penn Warren, Arnold Toynbee, H.L. Mencken, and others.
The book’s cover features a photograph of the mountains surrounding Flag Pond, taken by Larry Smith of ETSU.

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