John Fox Jr. published this great romantic novel of the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and Virginia in 1908, and the book quickly became one of America's favorites. It has all the elements of a good romance -- a superior but natural heroine, a hero who is an agent of progress and enlightenment, a group of supposedly benighted mountaineers to be drawn into the flow of mainstream American culture, a generous dose of social and class struggle, and a setting among the misty coves and cliffs of the blue Cumberlands. There is a budding romance between the two main characters. Engineer John Hale is an outsider, a ”furriner”, who comes to the Gap area and sees an opportunity for wealth in the natural resources here, namely coal and iron ore, and envisions a place that he can make a name for himself. He meets a young, beautiful mountain girl named June Tolliver who catches his eye. He seeks to befriend her family and her father, Devil Judd and buy his rich land. In a Pygmalion-style romance, Hale determines to educate and to basically free her from the mountain ways and lifestyle that she’s known her whole life. A mountain story wouldn’t be complete without a couple of proud feuding families. The Tollivers and the Falins have been fighting and feuding for over 30 years. The need to establish authority and law becomes important but unrecognized by the feuding families who don’t take kindly to Hale’s plans to civilize their backward ways. As Hale gets entangled in the politics of the region as well as the feud, industrialization and the railroad threaten to change the way of life of this isolated culture. John William Fox was born in the heart of Bluegrass country in Bourbon County, Kentucky. His father, John W. Fox was headmaster of the Stony Point Academy, which John Jr. attended from 1867 to 1875. After attending the Transylvania University for two years, he entered Massachusetts' Harvard university to study English in 1880, graduating cum laude in 1883. Fox moved to New York City where he worked for a time as a journalist with the New York Sun and then the New York Times. He then moved to Virginia where he joined his half-brother James in the real estate business, and the rest of the Fox family soon settled there too at Big Stone Gap, now an historic National Monument in memory of the Fox family. The new homestead saw a number of illustrious visitors, including future President Theodore Roosevelt, who became a life-long friend of Fox's. It was in Century magazine that his first story "A Mountain Europa" (1892) was published serially, followed by "A Cumberland Vendetta" a year later. The mountaineer-theme would be repeated in future works. Due to his popularity, he launched into the lecture circuit, travelling around Europe and America, including visits to President Roosevelt's White House, singing accompanying mountaineering songs and reading from his own works and others.