The
novelist John Knowles (1926-2001) attended Phillips Exeter and Yale,
and is the author of “A Separate Peace,” the quintessential
American prep school novel.
But he was born in West Virginia.
Sometimes his fiction was set there.
In
his novel “A Vein of Riches” (1978), Knowles described the
wealthy, exploitative, coal mine-owning Catherwood family. Young Lyle
Catherwood wanted out because he understood that a “labyrinth of
clammy menace underlay every limousine, tea dance and dividend in the
world above.”
Knowles’s
own father was a coal company executive. The novelist may have been
describing his own unease and need for escape.
Moral
qualms of the sort Lyle expressed, about denuding the landscape and
impoverishing the people of West Virginia, were rare indeed, if you
believe Steven Stoll, the author of “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of
Appalachia.”
His book is a powerful and outrage-making if somewhat
academic analysis of the forces that have made West Virginia one of
the sorriest places — statistically, at any rate — to live in
America.
“Ramp
Hollow” is not “Hillbilly
Elegy” redux.
Stoll, a professor of history at Fordham University, does not relate
his own story, and his book is not especially warm to the touch. But
as economic history it is gravid and well made.
Stoll
describes how outsiders did their worst to the agrarian smallholders
of Appalachia: taking their land by fiat in the 19th century and
later stripping the region’s trees for lumber and violating its
landscape in the extrication of coal.
Thus dispossessed, these people
were at the mercy of mine owners for sustenance, sent daily for
pitiful wages into sphincters of the earth.
Worse,
these smallholders were betrayed by their representatives. About West
Virginia, Stoll writes, “Perhaps no political leadership anywhere
in the United States or the Atlantic World ever exposed its own
people and environment to the same unbridled destruction and abuse.”
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Original review on: www.nytimes.com
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