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The story behind Wilma Dykeman’s “Family of Earth” is almost as captivating as the book itself. Found in her belongings after her death in 2006, the 200-page manuscript is an account of her Depression-era childhood north of Asheville, North Carolina.
Photo Above: Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood by Wilma Dykeman. (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 177 pp.
Dykeman’s memoir was written in her twenties, and “never had a chance with New York publishers” according to her son, Jim Stokely. And so she filed it away, and went on to write the books for which she’s well-known, both nonfiction (“The French Broad,” 1955) and fiction (“The Tall Woman,” 1962; “The Far Family,” 1966; “Return the Innocent Earth,” 1973).
Reading “Family of Earth” will leave you knowing that you’re in the company of an astonishingly perceptive young writer. Each chapter corresponds with a year in her life, and each reveals that Dykeman’s connection to nature and place began early and ran deep. She shares the characters in her world, the wisdom of her father, the compassion of her mother, the hard lives of her neighbors. When the book ends, Dykeman’s life is just beginning:
I had been happy beside the creek called Beaverdam. Yet even while I was there, I was forever leaving . . . For me, it was a beginning, and could be no more, no less.
She’s looking forward—at a bigger life than the one she’s been living. We can celebrate that. But read “Family of Earth,” and know you’ve been in the company of a child who looked at and listened to everything, living her father’s early warning that “[r]eading is fine, little girl…[but] books are only how someone else has seen these things . . . You’ve got to go out and see them for yourself.”
Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood by Wilma Dykeman. (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 177 pp.
The story above first appeared in our November/December 2023 issue.
