Mary Noailles Murfree's writing career spans almost fifty years. During that period she wrote eighteen novels and six volumes of short fiction on a variety of distinctly American subjects: polite Southern society, the Civil War, colonial history, and Mississippi culture. But it was her fiction set in the Tennessee mountains that established her reputation as one of America's leading local colorists. Known to her readers by the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, she enjoyed tremendous popularity during her own day, though she is known today only because a few of her short stories appear in American literature anthologies. Murfree is clearly a minor literary figure, but her small contribution was nonetheless significant. She helped established realistic Southern fiction as a respectable and popular form, and she made stories of the life and culture of the Tennessee mountaineers a distinctive part of the American local-color movement.

Murfree lived the life...