A Penny's Worth of Character by Jesse Stuart

The story is of a rooster at his farm, whose behavior was so dominant that it began attracting hens from other farms, leading to conflict with the neighbors. He wrote his first short story 'Nest Egg' when he was a sophomore in high school in 1923. Stuart published about 460 short stories. Jesse Stuart was the second youngest of that group ( William Saroyan was one year younger). In 1974, Gale Research (in American Fiction, 1900-1950) identified Jesse Stuart as one of the forty-four novelists in the first half of the 20th century with high critical acclaim. The novel also received critical praise and won the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Award for the best Southern book of the year. Taps for Private Tussie (1943) is perhaps his most popular novel, selling more than a million copies in only two years. Set in rural Kentucky, the novel tells the story of Anse Bushman, who loves working the land and wants more land. Stuart's first novel was Trees of Heaven (1940). Stuart was named poet laureate for the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 1954, and in 1961 he received the annual award from the American Academy of Poets. The book was described by Irish poet George William Russell (who wrote poetry under the name of AE) as the greatest work of poetry to come out of America since Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass. One day while Stuart was plowing in the field, he stopped and wrote the first line of a sonnet: 'I am a farmer singing at the plow,' the first line of the 703 sonnets he would collect in Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (1934). He then served as superintendent of the Greenup County Schools before ending his career as an English teacher at Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, Ohio. Later he was appointed principal at McKell High School, but resigned after one year to attend graduate school at Vanderbilt University, where Edwin Mims was one of his professors.

After graduating he returned to his home area and taught at Warnock High School in Greenup, Kentucky. EducationĪfter being denied admission at three colleges, Stuart was finally accepted at and attended Lincoln Memorial University, located in Harrogate, Tennessee. He was in college while she was still in high school in fact, Stuart taught Norris in her last year of school. In Stuart's memoir, The Thread That Runs So True, he explains how he met Norris at Lonesome Valley. They settled in W Hollow and had one daughter, Jessica Jane. In 1939, Stuart married Naomi Deane Norris, a school teacher.

Stuart served in the US Navy during World War II but did not see combat as his mission in his life. Stuart was born near Riverton, Greenup County, Kentucky, to Mitchell and Martha (Hilton) Stuart on August 8, 1906.

A Penny's Worth of Character by Jesse Stuart