King of the Moonshiners
Lewis R. Redmond in Fact and Fiction
With a Foreword by Durwood Dunn
Lewis R. Redmond was an archetypal moonshiner. On March 1, 1876, the twenty-one-year-old North Carolinian shot and killed a U.S. deputy marshal who tried to arrest him on charges of illicit distilling. He then fled to Pickens County, South Carolina, where, within three years, he gained national notoriety as the “This book deconstructs Redmond, whose dangerous persona captured the imagination of the middle-class American public.
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Read the feature in The Wall Street Journal.
Their Ancient Grudge
Harry Harrison Kroll
With an Introduction by Richard L. Saunders
First published in 1946, Harry Kroll’s portrayal of the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud (1878-90) is seen through the eyes of six women of the two families. Their Ancient Grudge is the last major treatment of this iconic sliver of American culture completed before the story struggle was reinterpreted by a later generation of historians. In crafting this compelling tale, Kroll drew both on historical studies and on interviews with descendants of the Hatfield and McCoy families as well as with other residents of the Tug Valley area of Kentucky and West Virginia.
Beech Mountain Man
The Memoirs of Ronda Lee Hicks
Thomas Burton, author of The Serpent and the Spirit: Glenn Summerford’s Story
With a Foreword by John Shelton Reed
Hicks recounts his life’s highs and lows with great candor and sometimes jarring humor. Readers might wonder how Ronda Hicks lived to tell his fascinating tales at all.
“Thomas Burton’s edition of what amounts to an autobiography of Ronda Lee Hicks-fighter, drinker, womanizer, and storyteller-represents a wiff of late-night honky-tonk whiskey and tobacco in its realism. . . . Hicks is a talented raconteur, whose gifts are well displayed in Burton’s careful editing.” —Erika Brady, Western Kentucky University