First published in 1940, James Still’s masterful novel has become a classic. It is the story, seen through the eyes of a boy, of three years in the life of his family and their kin. He sees his parents pulled between the meager farm with its sense of independence and the mining camp with its uncertain promise of material prosperity. In his world privation, violence, and death are part of everyday life, accepted and endured. Yet it is a world of dignity, love, and humor, of natural beauty which Still evokes in sharp, poetic images. No writer has caught more effectively the vividness of mountain speech or shown more honestly the trials and joys of mountain life.

James Still, the first poet laureate of Kentucky, recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, winner of the O. Henry Prize for best short story and many other awards and honors, is the author of numerous works of prose and poetry.

Reviews:"As you read you can hear the redbirds in the plum thickets and smell the pawpaws at first frost; you know, too, what it means to scrape the bottom of the meat box with a plow blade, hunting for a rind of pork amid the salt when the mines are closed."—Washington Post
"Still tells of [his people's] japes and sorrows and near starvation, the rich archaic poetry of their talk and customs in a clear, dry style as unsentimental as his seven-year-old's eyes. He has produced a work of art."—Time Magazine
"There is hunger and suffering and death in this child's experience but there is also laughter, riddles and tales told from the past, and the surrounding natural landscape moving from one season to the next. The reappearance of River of Earth is a welcome literary event."—Wilma Dykeman, South Atlantic Bulletin
"A tenderly written and well-sustained story."—New York Times
"His characters are endowed with vigor and stature. Its achievement as an artisic creation of a people and a locale is as sound as its pretensions are modest."—Saturday Review of Books its pure beauty and rhythm."—Nashville Tennessean
"An artistic masterpiece."—Lincoln Herald Times
"Mr. Still's local language is true and good. His happiest moments with the language are all his own, owing nothing to dialect or picturesque circumstance."—The New Republic
"The work is not simply of Appalachia; it is of our world in microcosm."—West Virginia History

"The reader . . . surely will be held chair--bound by Rich and haunting, James Still's River of Earth sings with the music of mountain speech and the rhythm of the natural world. There is not one false note in this sensitive masterpiece of sights and sounds, and long after you put it down, it keeps on singing in a voice that is distinct and strong, in language that is pure and true." --Gwyn Hyman Rubio, author of Icy Sparks and The Woodsman's Daughter