2019 Inductees

Fiction writer, essayist, literary critic, editor, screenwriter, teacher, and mentor, Gurney Norman is widely recognized as an authority on the literary and cultural history of Appalachia. Most of his career was spent as director of the University of Kentucky’s Creative Writing Program, fostering student luminaries such as poet Frank X Walker.

Norman was reared in southwestern Virginia and eastern Kentucky by two sets of grandparents.  After his education at the Stuart Robinson Settlement School, Norman graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1959 with degrees in literature and creative writing. At the university, he befriended fellow writers Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Ed McClanahan and Bobbie Ann Mason. In 1960, after a year of graduate school, Norman received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University where he studied with literary critic Malcolm Cowley and Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor.

After two years in the U.S. Army, he returned to eastern Kentucky in 1963 to work as a reporter for the Hazard Herald. Three years later he resigned to concentrate on writing fiction, taking a job with the U.S. Forest Service as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon in the summers of 1966 and 1967.

In 1971, his novel Divine Right’s Trip was famously published in the lower page margins of The Last Whole Earth Catalog and the next year in book form by the Dial Press and Bantam Books.

In the editor’s note to Alone Atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Carol M. Booker wrote, “It wasn’t the poverty of a washerwoman’s life in rural Kentucky that drove young Alice Allison relentlessly to succeed as a professional.  Poverty would be with her most of her life, even as a national reporter for more than 100 black weekly newspapers. What spurred her on was a keen intellect, immense determination, and a yearning for dignity and respect despite intractable racial barriers.”

Dunnigan lived the quintessential American story of a socially, economically, and educationally disadvantaged person who worked her way up from humble beginnings to resounding professional success. She became the first African American woman to be a White House correspondent and a credentialed member of the press galleries in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

She was born near Russellville to sharecroppers Willie and Lena Pitman Allison, and her fate seemed sealed when she married a tobacco farmer at age 19. But she wanted more from life and ended the marriage in 1930 to teach public school in nearby Todd County while enrolled in Journalism courses at Tennessee A & I College (now Tennessee State University).

In 1936, she became a freelance reporter for the Chicago branch of the American Negro Press (ANP). She became a reporter for the Chicago Defender in 1946 while enrolled at Howard University in statistics and economics courses, and later a staff reporter for the ANP.  In 1948, she covered President Harry S. Truman’s re-election campaign. Because the ANP wouldn’t fund her travel on the campaign trail, she raised the money herself.

When professor, poet, and scholar Jane Gentry passed away, Jeff Clymer, chair of the Department of English at the University of Kentucky, said, “Jane wrote with insight and grace of family, of the intricacies of our emotions, and of the ironies of everyday life. Her moving and elliptical poetry gave us new ways to think about life’s complexities, often with a dash of ironic humor.”

Jane Gentry grew up on a farm near the Fayette County community of Athens, where her ancestors in the Gentry and Bush families had lived since the settlement of nearby Boonesborough in the 1770s. Her deep roots in Central Kentucky became a guiding force in her work.

“When I was a child it was usual to see a team of mules in a field plowing or pulling a mower or a rake,” she recalled to Gurney Norman, a friend and colleague. “Everybody had a milk cow. Everybody had chickens that they gathered eggs from. By the time I was 20 you didn’t see that anymore, but I feel really lucky to have a gotten a feel for what that was like in that time before that turning.”

Gentry earned degrees in English literature from Hollins College (B.A., Phi Beta Kappa), Brandeis University (M.A.), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Ph.D.). At Hollins, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., founder of the Hollins creative writing program, became her mentor. “He had the gift of being able to see clearly what a writer is trying to do and to tell her what she needs to do to make the work better,” she said.

Upon Sue Grafton’s death in 2017, the online site Literary Hub commented on the legacy of her 40-year career writing mysteries: “. . . the familiar sight of one of Grafton’s alphabet novels has served as a reliable sign — whether a hardcover on the shelf or a well-traveled paperback poking out of an overnight bag — that somewhere nearby was a reader. And not just any reader, nor the kind who puts out books for show or piles them on the nightstand with good intentions, but an honest to God, dyed in the wool reader, someone who wears pages ragged then reaches for more, a middle-of-the-night joneser with a vast appetite for the art of character, words come to life, and, most of all, suspense.”

Grafton was born in Louisville, the daughter of C.W. Grafton, a mystery–writing lawyer who stayed late at work to turn out his three novels, and Vivian Harnsberger, a high school chemistry teacher. She grew up in the same neighborhood as “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson and was a few years behind him at Atherton High School. She attended the University of Louisville (B.A. 1961) and completed some graduate work in literary analysis at the University of Cincinnati.

She wrote two mainstream novels in the 1960s: Keziah Dane and The Lolly-Madonna War. She adapted the latter into the 1973 MGM movie Lolly-Madonna XXX, directed by Richard C. Sarafian. She did three other screen and tele-plays in the 1970s, including Rhoda in 1975, before writing the first of her 25 “alphabet” mystery novels, A Is for Alibi (1982).

Grafton said that while reading Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which is an alphabetical picture book of children who die by various means, she had the idea to write an alphabetically titled series of novels. She immediately sat down and made a list of all of the crime-related words she knew.  The central character, private investigator Kinsey Millhone, appears in each novel. The books have been translated into Dutch, Russian, Polish, Spanish, and French. Grafton’s detective is a traditional heroine: a loner, with a code, who works for just causes.  

When Ed McClanahan’s novel The Natural Man was published in 1983, Wendell Berry said, “Others have observed the natural man in the American condition before, but nobody has done it with such good humor. Ed McClanahan’s good humor both sharpens his eye and gentles his vision. I don’t know where else you would find workmanship that is at once so meticulous and so exuberant.”  McClanahan is known for his rollicking, good-naturedly crude humor, and a creatively extensive vocabulary. He has been compared to American humorists such as Mark Twain, John Kennedy Toole, and S. J. Perelman.

McClanahan was born in Brooksville, the seat of Bracken County. He is a graduate of Miami (Ohio) University (A.B., 1955) and the University of Kentucky (M.A., 1958). He received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 1962 and remained at the university as the E. H. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing until 1972.  While at Stanford, he was nicknamed “Captain Kentucky,” a persona he assumed when he became a member of Ken Kesey’s band of “Merry Pranksters.” He wore various costumes, including a cape (often an American flag), Air Force sunglasses, and gold cowboy boots.

McClanahan and his contemporaries Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Bobbie Ann Mason and Gurney Norman were considered the “Fab Five” group of Kentucky writers, products of the creative writing program at the University of Kentucky.  Professors Robert Hazel and Hollis Summers were influential in fostering these exceptional writers.

The title story of A Congress of Wonders was made into a prize-winning short film in 1993. McClanahan was the subject of an hour-long documentary on Kentucky Educational Television in 1994. His writing has appeared in numerous magazines, including Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. He twice won Playboy’s Best Non-Fiction award.

Helen Amelia Thomas was a famous White House correspondent and a trailblazer for women in Washington journalism. Born in Winchester, Kentucky, she was one of nine children of Lebanese immigrants. Her father was a grocer, and he moved the family to Detroit in 1924.

Thomas earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1942. She became a copy girl at the Washington Daily News and was quickly promoted to reporter. In 1943, she joined United Press and began covering local news and stories about women. In the early 1950s, Thomas began covering Washington celebrities and government agencies.

United Press merged with International News Service in 1958 to become United Press International. Two years later, Thomas began covering president-elect John F. Kennedy for UPI as one of the few women in the White House press corps. Thomas was named UPI’s chief White House correspondent in 1970 and White House bureau chief in 1974, a job she held until 2000.  

Thomas was the only female print journalist to accompany President Richard Nixon during his historic 1972 trip to China. As her career progressed, Thomas continued to remove barriers for female journalists. In 1975, she became the first woman to be admitted to the Gridiron Club, the historic Washington press group, which later named her its president. Thomas was the first female president of the White House Correspondents Association, 1975-1976.