By Amy Quigley

In a fashion that its author compares to a camera zooming in for a close-up and panning back for a wide view, John O'Brien's book At Home in the Heart of Appalachia combines the deeply personal story of a son's desire to understand the roots of his father's despair with a broad history of the Appalachian region—which O'Brien ultimately concludes is a mythic land.

"The development of the book's structure was organic," said O'Brien, who earned a bachelor's degree in English from WVU in 1967. "It wasn't the product of an outline. I was struggling to define Appalachia in my writing, and when my father died, I became desperate to understand his life. The book is a crossing over of these two things."

The Pulitzer Prize-nominated book opens with an account of O'Brien's journey to Piedmont on the day his father died. The two men had been estranged for 18 years, and for O'Brien revisiting his father's boyhood home was a gesture toward marking the older man's passing.

Memories of previous journeys into Appalachia follow. O'Brien recalls one of many childhood trips from the working-class Philadelphia neighborhood home of his family (which would eventually include 10 children) to Piedmont, where both his parents grew up.

O'Brien also remembers the journey his wife and two children made from Oswego, New York, to their new home in Pendleton County years later.

As the seasons pass in that Franklin home, O'Brien provides vivid descriptions of his adopted state's beauty, and a series of time-honored rituals unfold before the reader's eyes: fall cattle sales, deer hunting, spring ramp dinners, summer haymaking, sheep shearing, the Fourth of July parade down Main Street.

The book would be worth reading if only for the short, simple phrases in which O'Brien records the world around him. "The sky is steel gray and the sun is a white blister above the ridge," he writes in winter. "At dusk, the breeze picks up and it carries the taste and feel of moisture."

He draws upon various senses to evoke a mountain autumn."In October, the haze of late summer gives way to diamond light. The smell of wood smoke and apples laces the air like perfume. Chainsaws snarl from the hills and ridges as men top off their winter woodpiles."

It is the people of West Virginia, however, rather than the state's scenic beauty, that have always attracted O'Brien.

"I like West Virginians," he admits frankly. "Their directness, their lack of pretense, their touch with language-the bright metaphors, the rich cadence. My feelings about the people were reaffirmed as I wrote the book."

While conducting research, O'Brien interviewed more than 300 West Virginians, and these efforts transformed the book into something more than a memoir or a travelogue. The reader walks away from the book with greater knowledge about everything from the history of the coal industry to the effects of missionaries on Appalachia, from the launch of the local color movement in literature to the impact of the 1985 floods on eastern West Virginia.

Writing the book made him aware, O'Brien says, of his status as part of the continuing historical drama of Appalachia, of the reasons for its invention and for its persistence as an often-damaging myth.

Exiled from Appalachia
O'Brien's love for West Virginia started early. He enjoyed his boyhood trips to the state, though class tensions existed between his mother's and father's families: the middle-class Bells and the working-class O'Briens. He remembered his father as being more ambivalent about returning home.

"He was happy and excited as we piled into the old car in Philadelphia. Crossing the state line, his horn-toot was heartfelt; he was a West Virginia boy coming home. Driving around Piedmont, he pointed out the homes of people he knew and occasionally told stories about them. Once, driving past Piedmont High, he sang part of his school song. He liked being with his younger brother, Phillip. . . .I can remember my father clowning around with Phillip, and even laughing out loud, but a good part of the time on those visits he seemed anxious and preoccupied."

Only much later would O'Brien come to understand both the class tensions and his father's conflicted feelings as outgrowths of the Appalachian myth.

Meanwhile, he returned to West Virginia as a young man to attend WVU, despite his father's reservations about the wisdom of pursuing a college education.

"College wasn't something O'Briens did, or even thought about. We graduated from high school, found a factory or unskilled office job, did a stint in the service, and married other Catholics. When I told my father of my intentions after dinner one night, he laughed. He was not being deliberately cruel, but my announcement, coming out of the blue, startled him. . . .We had our place in the world, and trying to change that was dangerous. No good could come of it."

After a disastrous first semester and a brief break from the University, O'Brien returned and settled into an enjoyable student life in Morgantown. It took six years to earn his bachelor's degree because he worked part-time and chose his ultimate major only after stints in forestry and biology.

A self-proclaimed "dreadful student," O'Brien says the learning he did in Morgantown took place mostly during long conversations and debates he engaged in with a group of "artsy, literary" friends over a few beers.

O'Brien met his wife, Becky Sheets, a native of Green Bank in Pocahontas County, while attending the University. They married in 1966 and both graduated the following year. The couple then taught for a year in an Aleut fishing village in Alaska before returning to WVU for graduate school. During the 1970s and early 1980s, as they started their family, the O'Briens traveled across America and lived in Virginia, Iowa, Alaska again, California, West Virginia, and Virginia again before settling in upstate New York.

Son Christopher was born in 1970, and daughter Shelly in 1975. O'Brien earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1972 and attended Stanford University on a highly competitive Wallace E. Stegner Fellowship.

Throughout their travels, and despite his Philadelphia upbringing, O'Brien always felt that he was from West Virginia. He didn't always recognize, however, the visions that a mention of the state's name conjured up in the minds of outsiders.

"They all knew about Appalachia-strange, backward people struggling with grinding poverty in a devastated landscape; feral hillbillies; Hatfields and McCoys, black-bearded moonshiners murdering one another. That or quaint folk in strap overalls and granny dresses playing fiddles while they clogged around."

For O'Brien, returning to the state for good in the mid-1980s was a way to try to reconnect with his father, and it also started him on a search for what Appalachia really means.

In search of an imaginary place
O'Brien's conclusion is that the myth of Appalachia was created in the late 19th century—partly by reporters and practitioners of the local color literary movement who fed the desire of the nation's emerging middle class to elevate itself above an imagined hillbilly class, partly by politicians and business people as a way of avoiding the real problems facing the region, and partly by well-intentioned missionaries who, in an attempt to raise funds, exaggerated the backward nature of the people they came to help.

"Appalachia and hillbillies became fixtures in America's imaginary landscape," O'Brien said. "Hillbilly cartoons appear in major magazines again and again. They also appear in movies and in jokes that are repeated endlessly. In a sense, the existence of cartoonish hillbillies makes the American middle class feel more secure about their sophistication and arrival."

The unemployment and poverty that do exist in West Virginia are, in O'Brien's view, a result of the fact that 75 percent of the state and 85 percent of its natural resources belong to outside interests.

For those who live in the region, the myth is as damaging as it is persistent, says O'Brien, who argues that shame from the hillbilly label helped to create the pessimistic view of the future that haunted his father and hurt their relationship.

"Ultimately, his message was: Keep your head and expectations down, and you might slip by unnoticed. Don't be making too much of yourself in your mind. Pride cometh before a fall. . . .My father was convinced that hope created disappointment and that ambition invited tragedy, and his pessimism included his children; we would never amount to anything because he was our father."

Because writing the book was such a personal journey, O'Brien has been amazed by the overwhelmingly positive response it has evoked in national critics and West Virginia citizens alike. He's even heard of people putting his picture up on their refrigerators.

"Forget the Pulitzer," he jokes. "If you make the refrigerators in West Virginia, you've really done something."

Despite his own surprise, it's easy for a West Virginia reader to understand why the book resonates for so many. O'Brien's writing shares the qualities that he most admires in West Virginians: lack of pretense, vivid metaphors, honesty. More than that, he succeeds in shattering the stereotypes from which state residents have long recoiled.

"I want (people) to know that one of the richest and loveliest regions of America was savagely exploited and that the exploitation continues," he has written. "Despite this outrage, and the political corruption resulting from it, most Appalachians live in decent, modest homes, own and drive normal cars, care about their families, and go to work every day. . . .I would like to put a small dent in the myth of Appalachia."

"I fell in love with
WVU and Morgantown. . ."

Deer Blank,

I thought I would add this to the answer about why I like Morgantown and WVU. All that I said about Morgantown being working-class or blue-collar remains true; that has a lot to do with it. But I thought my first memory of Morgantown might help explain my attachment as well. I took the 11 trolley out of Southwest Philadelphia with two cardboard suitcases. At the 30th street station I took the train from Philadelphia to Cumberland and then a bus from Cumberland to Morgantown. I got off the bus at the far end of University Avenue, down by the Westover bridge, then walked up University Ave. with my cardboard suitcases, looking like the Rube that I was. It was a late August evening and, as I recall, quite warm. When I walked up past the University library I was struck with how beautiful and clean the buildings were. In Southwest Philadelphia every public building had graffiti all over it and the streets were littered with trash and broken furniture. The WVU campus seemed spotless and elegant if only by contrast. As it turns out the fraternity boys were standing out in front of the fraternity houses doing their chants or yells one after the other. Then one of the groups began to sing and their faint voices drifted across campus. I fell in love with WVU and Morgantown at that moment, I think. I also met Becky there, and so memories of Morgantown and WVU will always be woven with the best part of my life. In any case I thought I would add this to my answer. I hope it helps a little.

Best, John

For an autographed copy of At Home in the Heart of Appalachia, send $26.50 to John O'Brien, P.O. Box 148, Franklin, WV 26807. Even down-home Appalachian writers have web sites. O'Brien's is at www.johnobrien.org.

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