1. Jesse Hilton Stuart was an American writer, school teacher, and school administrator who is known for his short stories, poetry, and novels as well as non-fiction autobiographical works set in central Appalachia.
15 Facts About Jesse Stuart
1. 2.
Jesse Stuart was named the poet laureate of Kentucky in 1954.
3.
Jesse Stuart was born near Riverton, Greenup County, Kentucky, to Mitchell and Martha Stuart on August 8,1906.
4.
Jesse Stuart served in the US Navy during World War II but did not see combat as his mission in his life.
5.
In 1939, Jesse Stuart married Naomi Deane Norris, a school teacher.
6.
Jesse Stuart was in college while she was still in high school; in fact, Stuart taught Norris in her last year of school.
7.
Jesse Stuart then served as superintendent of the Greenup County Schools before ending his career as an English teacher at Portsmouth High School in Portsmouth, Ohio.
8.
One day while Jesse 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.
9.
Jesse 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.
10.
Jesse Stuart was the second youngest of that group.
11.
Jesse Stuart wrote his first short story "Nest Egg" when he was a sophomore in high school in 1923.
12.
Jesse Stuart described the role that teaching played in his life in The Thread that Runs So True, though he changed the names of places and people.
13.
Jesse Stuart first taught school in rural Kentucky at the age of 16 at Cane Creek Elementary School, which became Lonesome Valley in his book.
14.
In May 1982, Jesse Stuart suffered a stroke that left him comatose.
15.
Jesse Stuart died on February 17,1984, at Jo-Lin Nursing Home, near his boyhood home, in Ironton, Ohio.