This work is a biography of John Fox, Jr. It draws from personal and family correspondence and covers his entire life, from his birth in Stony Point, Kentucky, in 1862, to his death from pneumonia in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, in 1919. His early life and education at his father's school, his two years at Transylvania University in Lexington, his transfer to Harvard and graduation in 1883, his work for New York newspapers, and his return home in the mid-1880s to work with his half-brother in the coal mines are all documented. In the 1880s he began his first novel, A Mountain Europa, and over the next thirty years wrote dozens of short stories and nine novels from the family home in Big Stone Gap, including Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (his first to gain the status of bestseller) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.
