Janice Holt Giles

We were very excited to discover the books of Janice Holt Giles, not only because they tell honest and straightforward stories of country people, but because many of them are based in her adopted Appalachian home of Adair County, Kentucky—which is our adopted home as well, Mrs. Giles having lived only a few miles from us. That's a special treat for us, but we recommend these books to you for their extensive knowledge of Appalachian and country ways; like the Little Britches and Little House on the Prairie books, Mrs. Giles's stories can give you a deeper understanding of pre-modern American living, a way of life that is nearly extinct.

In the mid-40s Janice Holt was a city dweller, a woman in her late 30s living in Louisville, working as a seminary professor's secretary and raising a daughter from a failed marriage. During the war she met a soldier, Henry Giles, from very rural Adair County, Kentucky. They fell in love and decided to marry as soon as Henry left the military. The first few years of their married life was spent in Louisville, but eventually they decided to move to a small house and acreage on Giles Ridge, where Henry's family had lived as a tightly knit community for the past two hundred years.

It was on Giles Ridge that she began her literary career with a trilogy of novels about life in the hills which remain to this day among her most popular works. While many others wrote of desperate mountain communities saved by outsiders, Giles wrote in These Enduring Hills, Miss Willie, and Tara's Healing of desperate outsiders who moved into mountain communities to "do good," but found that the strong hill folk could help them to get their own lives together. (No wonder these books are so popular among native mountaineers.) When Janice Holt Giles' husband became a little sensitive to the literary fame of his wife, she responded by working with him on a novel, Harbin's Ridge, which was initially published under his name alone. Janice Holt Giles' power as a historical novelist was established her trilogy about the settling of Kentucky: The Kentuckians, the story of the men, including Daniel Boone, who first established homesteads in Kentucky; Hannah Fowler, the story of a strong pioneer woman; and The Believers, a novel of the Shaker religious community.

When the Army Corps of Engineers dammed up the Green River, the Giles' were forced to rebuild, completing their new home in 1958; the story of the house is told in A Little Better than Plumb . Almost all Giles books before were set in the Kentucky hills. After this move, Janice Holt Giles devoted most of her energy to writing about the West and to autobiographical writing. Here she produced six very popular Western novels, including three adopted by book clubs, Johnny Osage, Savanna, and Voyage to Santa Fe. Janice Holt Giles died on June 1, 1979 at the age of 70.

• 40 Acres and No Mule. Janice and Henry Giles took what little savings they had, left the city, and moved into a small cabin in Adair County, Kentucky, the rural region that had been home to Henry's family for two hundred years. This is a straightforward, unromantic, yet loving account of their first two years on Giles Ridge as Mrs. Giles learned to shed her city ways and embrace country life.
• The Enduring Hills. A fine novel in its own right, this book is especially good as a companion to 40 Acres and No Mule, being a fictional version of Henry Giles' early life—growing up on the ridge (here called Piney Ridge), shouldering family responsibilities at an early age, deciding to leave home and see the wide world, marrying a city girl, working in the city, and finally returning to the old home place.
• Miss Willie. The story of an earnest teacher who moves to Piney Ridge to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. A sequel to The Enduring Hills, there are some laugh-out-loud moments where Mrs. Giles uses Miss Willie's missionary zeal to poke fun at her own do-gooding inclinations.
• Tara's Healing. Third and last in the Piney Ridge series, a WWII officer moves to the ridge in the hopes that life in the hill country can restore to him the peace that the war robbed him of.
• Shady Grove. Set not on Piney Ridge but in Broke Neck, Kentucky—which might as well be Piney Ridge moved into the 1960s. The only flat-out comedy that Mrs. Giles wrote, and it is really very funny.

• The Kentuckians. iIn 1775 David Cooper and some friends follow Daniel Boone into what to some was the westermost county of Virginia and to others was a place to build their own empire. The story is good, and the historical details are accurate and fascinating.
• Hannah Fowler continues the story begun in The Kentuckians, telling of one of the early settler couples who venture out from the safety of a fort to establish a homestead and family. A riveting account of the difficult yet rewarding work accomplished by those who first set out to settle this country.
• The Land Beyond the Mountains. It's now the 1780s, and Kentucky is moving towards statehood, but General James Wilkinson would rather that it become a Spanish territory—under his governance, of course.
• The Believers. Hannah Fowler's daughter Rebecca follows her husband into the cultish Shaker community. This is a well-written and accurate account of the religious enthusiasm that swept the South during the Second Great Awakening.
• Run Me a River. Kentucky has a rich history of river life. Set in 1861, at the beginning of Kentucky’s reluctant entry into the Civil War, this novel tells the story of a five-day adventure on the Green River.

• The Plum Thicket. Janice Giles grew up in Arkansas, the setting for this story of a young girl who discovers some of the secrets in her family's history. Mrs. Giles said, “Out of my forty-odd years of living, much of whatever wisdom I have acquired has been distilled into this book.”