Charles Egbert Craddock - Encyclopedia

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES

CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK (1850-), the pen-name of Mary Noailles Murfree, American author, who was born near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on the 24th of January 1850, the great-granddaughter of Col. Hardy Murfree. She was crippled in childhood by paralysis. She attended school in Nashville and Philadelphia. Spending her summers in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, she came to know the primitive people there with whose life her writings deal. She contributed to Appleton's Journal,' and, first in 1878, to The Atlantic Monthly. No one, apparently, suspected that the author of these stories was a woman, and her identity was not disclosed until 1885, a year after the publication of her first volume of short stories, In the Tennessee Mountains. She deals mainly with the narrow, stern life of the Tennessee mountaineers, who, left behind in the advance of civilization, live amid traditions and customs, and speak a dialect, peculiarly their own; and her work abounds in exquisite descriptions of scenery. Among her other books are: Where the Battle was Fought (1884), a novel dealing with the old aristocratic southern life; Down the Ravine (1885) and The Story of Keedon Bluffs (1887) for young people; The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885), a novel; In the Clouds (1886), a novel; The Despot of Broomsedge Cove (1888), a novel; In the "StrangerPeople's" Country (1891); His Vanished Star (1894), a novel; The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories (1895); The Phantoms of the Footbridge and Other Stories (1895); The Young Mountaineers (1897), short stories; The Juggler (1897) The Story of Old Fort Loudon (1899); The Bushwhackers and Other Stories (1899); The Champion (1902); A Spectre of Power (1903); The Frontiersman (1904); The Storm Centre (1905); The Amulet (1906); The Windfall (1907); and Fair Mississippian (1908).