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Afterword
by
Thomas D. Clark
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Among the ranks of Kentucky authors, none is more worthy of a searching biography than Jesse Stuart, and none presents his biographer with a greater interpretive challenge-that of unraveling the factual and spiritual dynamics of a complex personality. David Dick has been diligent in his search for factual, but more important is his effort to strip out and identify the contrasting and often contradictory strands of Stuart's life and writings. To do so has required a deep bonding with his subject.
Dick has been a compassionate biographer, searching indefatigably for the inner spiritual nuances that buoyed Stuart's overflowing imagination. But perhaps his greatest contribution is to help us understand Jesse Stuart's attachment to his native place-W-Hollow in northeastern Kentucky-and to the deeply ingrained folkways and traditions of that place that shaped him both as a man and as a writer. On the one hand they served Stuart as a continuing source of inspiration, but Dick perceives also the relentless grip of the lingering frontier land that provided him an insulative blanket of refuge.
Wisely, Dick has given his subject free rein to lope in and out of his biography. Posthumously, Jesse Stuart speaks out, loud and clear, as he did in life. Collectively the Stuart letters provide penetrating insight into the soul of a man who teetered on the borderline between an arrest stage of adolescence and literary maturity.
Viewed from the pinnacle of the American literary canon, Jesse Stuart must be identified as an individual detached from the main current of the latter half of the twentieth century. An anomaly of his writings is the fact that he came of literary age in an era when a host of southern regional writers were ardently creating a fresh literary identity for their land. Measured against the offerings of the famous Vanderbilt Agrarians and New Critics whom he once hoped to emulate, Jesse Stuart appears as a virtual cipher, a near fugitive in another time and place.
No doubt in time to come other Stuart biographers will weigh the turnings of life in a primitive agrarian environment. They will appraise Jesse Stuart and his writings by various literary and human standards. None, however, can deny their subject's success in carving out a distinctive niche in the great panorama of American literature.
In writing Stuart's biography, David Dick has been generous in spirit and space. He has presented a regional author with the candor of Clio but also with a jovian judiciousness. There may be drifting around "out there" a cache of fugitive facts that may someday enlarge our insights into Jesse Stuart, man and author, but this seems unlikely at present. David Dick has blazed a bold literary path to the W-Hollow door of a prodigious author, a man who held tenaciously to the handle of a bull-tongue with one hand with the other a pen constantly overflowing with promise.
Thomas D. Clark
Historian Laureate
Commonwealth of Kentucky
May 4, 2004
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