Gurney Norman

Gurney Norman is one of the most powerful and compelling personalities ever to come out of the Appalachian Mountains. He is also one of the region's best writers.

While many writers have attempted to "capture" the way of life of poor and working class mountain people without living it, Gurney Norman lived that life long before he attempted to write about it. While much contemporary writing is pointless and visionless, Gurney Norman is a writer who does have a vision. While many writers who identify with a particular region do not see beyond its borders, Gurney Norman's work is informed by a truly international perspective. While many writers are consumed in their own selves, Gurney Norman is deeply committed to working closely with young writers from the mountains, so much so that his friends are constantly urging Norman to spend more time writing and less time hanging out with young people!

Gurney Norman was born in Grundy, Virginia, in 1937. He grew up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia during the forties and fifties living with different kinfolks in different towns. When Gurney was a sophomore at Stuart Robinson Settlement School in Letcher County, his older brother was a senior football hero who Gurney depended upon greatly. The death of this brother in a jeep accident deeply affected Gurney Norman, but he went on to graduate from Stuart Robinson and the University of Kentucky.

Following graduation from U. K. , Gurney Norman joined the migration of the most hip of his generation to California, landing in the stimulating environment of Palo Alto. He was comfortable there, feeling that there were many common elements between the laid-back, close to nature lifestyle he had known in the mountains and the people-centered, unhassled life-style of the youth of the sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area.

His first novel, Divine Right's Trip, was published in the margins of the Last Whole Earth Catalog--a compendium of tools designed to enable people to live more simply and closer to nature will less reliance upon fads and multi-national corporations. Hilarious and profound, Divine Right's Trip is a startling reversal of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and the whole body of literature of America's various Westward Movements. Divine Right's Trip is the saga of California hippies traveling west to east towards Eastern Kentucky--eventually settling into inner peace on a farm there raising rabbits and using rabbit pellets to reclaim abandoned strip mines.

Many of the characters in Divine Right's Trip are stoned much of the time, and they swear constantly. Deep down, however, they have the greatest respect for the old-fashioned rural life style of their forbearers of previous generations. They are rebelling against their parents' generation but not against their grandparents. They want America to skip the generation which brought the world the atomic bomb, the multi-national corporation and the substitution of formula for breast milk. They want their country to get back to a way of life which cares more about the land and people and less about technology and profits.

After writing Divine Right's Trip, Gurney Norman went on to emulate his characters' dream of returning to Eastern Kentucky initially obtaining a job as a reporter for the Hazard Herald. Before long he accepted a position as a writer-in-residence and teacher at the University of Kentucky.

Gurney Norman's subsequent collection of inter-connected short stories, Kinfolks, has a very different outward tone than Divine Right's Trip. It is set completely in Eastern Kentucky and has no references to drugs, although some of the stories do have a little cussing and drinking. It is appropriate for a much wider audience, and, in fact, is immensely popular with all generations.

The people of Kinfolks are just as imperfect as the characters in Divine Right's Trip. And it is important to understand that they hold dear the same old-fashioned values--even when they are incapable of exemplifying them.

In the last several years, Gurney Norman has put as much energy into electronic media as print media. Although he has published exerts of his forthcoming novel, Crazy-Quilts, he is no longer making any promises as to when it will go to press. However, he has completed three striking television documentaries, on the Big Sandy Watershed, the Kentucky River Watershed and the Wilderness Road. As a creative writing teacher at the University of Kentucky, Norman works diligently to nurture the next generation of writers, but he is also very active working with secondary school teachers to inspire them to encourage their students. In addition Norman is very active in working with the Southern Appalachian Writers Collective, the literary magazine, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel and Appalshop, the grass-roots arts empire located in the Eastern Kentucky coalfields at Whitesburg in Letcher County near Norman's old high school.

A Gurney Norman Bibliography