From my highest hill

In From My Highest Hill, a long-overlooked masterpiece of American literature, Olive Tilford Dargan captures with affection and uncanny accuracy the character traits, attitudes, folkways, and dialect of the people who lived in the Great Smoky Mountains during the early years of the twentieth century. First published in 1925 as Highland Annals, the story cycle was extensively revised before it was reissued under its current title in 1941. The second edition included for the first time fifty striking illustrations by photographer Bayard Wootten. Among the delightful characters who come to life in the book are Serena, who "always take[s] the gait [she] can keep," and Sam, who has "always got duck-oil on his tongue." In her moving and amusing encounters with her highland neighbors, Dargan's narrator, an outsider and a woman alone, learns many valuable lessons from them and gradually wins their acceptance and trust.