In preparation for an upcoming bicentennial presentation on Tennessee literature, Ensor surveyed the past 200 years of Tennessee literature. He found some names of note, among them George Washington Harris (the creator of Sut Lovingood), the Vanderbilt Fugitives and Agrarians (John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, et al.), James Agee, Alex Haley, Peter Taylor, Cormac McCarthy. But status as a truly major figure of American literature has eluded Tennessee's men and women of letters, to the regret of Tennessee native Ensor, who also notes that some of the state's most important writers have frequently left the state--Agee, Warren, Taylor, and McCarthy among them.

While the Vanderbilt writers of the 1920s and after have surely received the greatest amount of critical attention, relatively little of their work focuses on Tennessee itself.

But the people and places of Tennessee did enjoy a brief moment in the national spotlight, thanks to four women of the short-lived 19th-century local color movement.

"After the Civil War, the local color movement swept the country. Readers became eager for novels and short stories about a particular place, such as New England, the West, or the South. The idea was that the local fiction writer knows his or her area and can interpret it; someone from the outside really doesn't," Ensor says. The trend began in New England, where Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman wrote stories about their immediate neighbors. Soon the writers of other sections began to produce fiction about their particular places.

The women who brought the Tennessee mountains to the attention of the nation's readers were Mary Noailles Murfree (1850-1922), Sarah Barnwell Elliott (1848-1928), Will Allen Dromgoole (1860-1934), and Emma Bell Miles (1879-1919). Three out of the four were unmarried, a fact which may explain their ability to pursue writing careers. Ensor comments, whimsically imitating the language of a character in a local color story, "If they'd a gotten married, they'd a been too busy a-cookin' the vittles and a-raisin' a whole passel of younguns to have been a-writin' any books." Miles, who was married and gave birth to five children, wrote because her husband could not support the family.

Tennessee's mountain people were ripe for this sort of treatment. Mary Noailles Murfree, the best known of Tennessee's local colorists, wrote stories of their exploits for the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly under the name of Charles Egbert Craddock. "His" writings were enormously popular at the time. "I can imagine the Bostonians reading them and saying, 'How quaint,'" Ensor dryly remarks.

Like most of the other local color writers, Murfree was not a mountaineer. She was born into a prominent Middle Tennessee family (Murfreesboro was named for an ancestor) who were able to send her to a Philadelphia finishing school. Her knowledge of the mountains, such as it was, came from spending a series of summers at the Cumberland resort of Beersheba Springs (south of McMinnville) and occasional visits to such places as Montvale Springs (south of Maryville). Murfree and her sister ventured out to buy meat and produce from the locals, and apparently some local people came to the "watering places," as they were known, to sell their goods.

Under the Craddock pseudonym, Murfree's story "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" was published in the Atlantic Monthly for May 1878, the first of her many appearances there. It and seven other stories were later collected in Murfree's first book, In the Tennessee Mountains (1884). The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, her first novel, appeared the following year. In all, Murfree published 25 books, the last of them in 1914. Although some of her stories take place elsewhere, the prolific Murfree ("She didn't know when to quit," Ensor observes) primarily used as settings the Cumberland and Great Smoky mountains. She has been criticized in more recent times for not knowing her settings and characters more intimately, but as Ensor points out, "She knew them a lot better than the Bostonians did."

When Murfree traveled to Boston in March 1885 to reveal her true identity, "it caused quite a stir," Ensor says. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of the Atlantic, had known that "Craddock" was a pseudonym, but he had not guessed that "M.N. Murfree" was other than a male Tennessean. Despite the revelation of her true name and gender, Murfree continued to publish as Craddock for the rest of her writing career.

Born in Georgia, but raised in Sewanee, Tennessee, where her father was one of the founding bishops of the University of the South, Sarah Barnwell Elliott was notable for bringing feminist views into the local color arena. For example, her fourth novel, The Durket Sperret (1898)--that's "spirit" to you and me--chronicles the life of a young mountain woman from the Sewanee area who remains independent even after repeated offers of marriage. In all, Elliott published six novels between 1879 and 1901, the best of which is usually said to have been Jerry (1891). Her writing, though commended, was never as popular as Murfree's. For one thing, Tennessee's local color scene was already dominated by Murfree, and for another, Ensor says, "She was simply not as good a writer." Her handling of dialect in particular falls short of Murfree's, he says.

By contrast, Will Allen Dromgoole achieved wide acclaim both in Boston and in the South. She did not need to invent a male pseudonym: her father, wishing his seventh child to be a boy, had already decided on the name William, and that was the name Dromgoole received, even though she turned out to be a girl. Her first book, The Sunny Side of the Cumberland (1886), was published under the name "Will Allen," but she almost always signed herself "Will Allen Dromgoole." Readers frequently assumed that she was male.

Like Murfree, Dromgoole was prolific, completing 14 books, numerous short stories, 7,500 poems and songs, and more than 5,000 columns for the Nashville Banner, where she worked for several decades. Dromgoole frequently published in the Boston Arena, whose editor, B.O. Flower, enthusiastically pronounced her a "Southern woman of genius." Of Dromgoole's stories Flower wrote that "her love of the South is only surpassed by the affection she feels for the mountains and valleys of her dear old Tennessee." Modern readers may object to the sentimentalism of Dromgoole's stories, but she was widely respected in her day. Before she died in 1934, she had been named poet laureate of both Tennessee and of the Poetry Society of the South.

Though she published after the heyday of the local color movement, Emma Bell Miles also wrote about Tennessee life. Her book The Spirit of the Mountains (1905) provided a truer account of mountain ways than most of what appeared in the pages of the other three writers. For much of her life Miles lived in a shack on Walden's Ridge near Chattanooga, first with her parents and then with her husband. The Spirit of the Mountains was drawn from Miles's experience of teaching school on Walden's Ridge. In her spare moments she wrote down the mountain poems and songs she had heard, thus providing a valuable account for future generations. Her prose was, however, prone to the sentimentalism so often found in local color fiction: "Dear common things! Memories of hours of spiritual exaltation do not cling to the heart like the mere smells of hot meadows, of rain-wet plowed land, of barn lofts and kitchen corners....Oh, the poignant sweetness, the infinite pathos of common things!"

Oh, indeed.

What has been described as the "smarmy sentimentalism" of local color fiction may have been part of its undoing. In any case, Ensor says, "By the 1890s, the trend in American literature was realistic, away from the excesses of romanticism." The next surge in Tennessee literature did not take place for another 30 years, when Vanderbilt's Fugitive group formed. Attention turned away from the mountains to the capital city and to a way of writing less easily understood by the general reader. But whatever their faults, and however briefly, the local color ladies succeeded in giving Tennessee a place in the national literary scene.