Spirits of Just Men is a great place to begin learning about Southern mountain people and their history-our country’s history. These are remnants of a lifestyle that needs to influence the rest of America rather than vice versa. They go into her house, pick up the pie off the kitchen counter, and leave her money. Thompson would not be a bit surprised to learn that just south of there, where I spend time each summer, I once talked on the phone to a power company representative who asked me to go outside and get the electric meter reading so she wouldn’t “have to send a truck up there.” Friends of mine have bought pies from a mountain woman they’ve never seen. With moonshining as a key, Spirits of Just Men unlocks and spreads before us a simple and sane lifestyle still alive today in places like Franklin County. Lee’s grand-nephew Carter Lee, who was both defendant and prosecutor in criminal trials preacher James Goode Lane Hash, a circuit rider who wrote history on large wall calendars for fifty years and Miss Ora Harrison, a missionary who stood up for a bootlegger at his trial. Anderson becomes a recurring participant in Thompson’s book. He wrote both fiction and nonfiction condemning “extractive” industries and government policies, while championing the mountain farmer. Sherwood Anderson was on the scene in Franklin County during the Depression and also sensed this chasm.
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