Rent Back of Beyond A Horace Kephart Biography

Synopsis

An icon of the Southern Appalachian region known for the seminal books Camping and Woodcraft (1906) and Our Southern Highlanders (1913), Horace Kephart was instrumental in efforts to establish the Appalachian Trail along the Tennessee-North Carolina border. But Kephart is perhaps best known for his decade-long crusade to help protect the Smokies as a national park. For Kephart, this campaign represented a personal commitment: "I owe my life to these mountains and I want them preserved so that others may profit from them," he wrote. The culmination of decades of tireless research and devoted scholarship, Back of Beyond: A Horace Kephart Biography is the compelling story of this librarian-turned-woodsman who had a far-reaching effect on wilderness literature and outdoor pursuits throughout North America. Kephart's advocacy for the establishment of Great Smoky Mountains National Park earned him the title Apostle of the Smokies. But it is his enigmatic charisma and multifaceted backstory that will draw readers in and hold them spellbound when they pick up this new title by co-authors George Ellison and Janet McCue published by Great Smoky Mountains Association, a nonprofit with a mission of support for the national park. Born in Pennsylvania in 1862 and raised in Iowa, Kephart went from graduate studies at Cornell University to a promising career as a librarian at Yale University and a director of the St. Louis Mercantile Library. With six children and a beautiful wife, Kephart seemingly had it all. Until he didn't. In Back of Beyond, Ellison and McCue reveal Kephart's fall from grace, the depths of his despair, his complicated private life, and his fortitude in forging a new existence in the Great Smoky Mountains. They do this through in-depth historical research and an exploration of Kephart's own major writings on frontier history, camping and woodcraft, and the lives of his neighbors on Hazel Creek, his personal back of beyond in the Smokies.

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