Wade Hall, longtime English professor at Louisville’s Bellarmine College, spent decades gathering this sweeping collection of 179 writers with ties to Kentucky. It spans from pioneer diaries and frontier tributes to essays, poems, and stories by figures like Abraham Lincoln, Robert Penn Warren, and Wendell Berry.
Hall introduces each author with historical context, tracing the state’s cultural and political history while confronting hard chapters like slavery and racism alongside its literary triumphs. The result is a rich, wide-ranging portrait of Kentucky told through two centuries of its own writers.
Published 2005
896 pages
$56.16