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Charles Egbert Craddock - Tennessee Author

© Greg Cruey

One of Tennessee's lesser known (but important) women writers was Charles Egbert Craddock (1850-1922).

Her real name was Mary Noailles Murfree, and she was born in Murfreesboro, Tn., just on the western edge of Appalachian Tennessee. Craddock was a pseudonym she used when she began publishing in the late 1870s. Through her writings, she helped to introduce the outside world to life in central Appalachia.

"HIGH above Lost Creek Valley towers a wilderness of pine. So dense is this growth that it masks the mountain whence it springs." The begninning of Murfree's first novel

In the aftermath of the Civil War, northerners began to travel in the southern portions Appalachian region. The interest in the region led to the development of a literary school from the 1870s into the 1890s that became know as the Local Color Movement.

For more on the Local Color Movement in Appalachian literature, take a look at the section of Dr. Ron Eller's Lecture Notes for Appalachian History which deal with the movement.

Several parts of the country saw Local Color Movements develop. The Appalachian Local Color Movement produced well over 200 travel sketches and short stories and a picture of Appalachia was born in literature, a picture which presented Appalachia as a place unlike anywhere else in America, a place not yet changed by progress.

Appalachia became the symbol of the past, in contrast to an America that was moving into the future faster than many people were comfortabe with.

Mary Noailles Murfree was among the writers at the pinnacle of the movement. She began writing short stories for the Atlantic Monthly in 1878. He first novel In the Tennessee Mountains, came out in 1884 and is online as part of the Digitized Library of Southern Literature at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill. Murfree went on to become a prolific novelist of mountain backwoods life. The UNCH has put her and other writers online as part of a program called Documenting the American South.

Murfree's works were usually love stories about mountain women. She Stressed the beauty of the region, the simplicity of how the mountain people lived, and the strangeness of their ways and their speech patterns.

An example from early in her first novel:

"I do declar', it sets me plumb catawampus ter hev ter listen ter them blacksmiths, up yander ter thar shop, at thar everlastin' chink-chank an' chink-chank, considerin' the tales I hearn 'bout 'em, when I war down ter the quiltin' at M'ria's house in the Cove."