Sadness in Appalachia

Night Comes to the Cumberland: A Biography of a Depressed Area
by Harry C. Caudill, foreword by Stewart Udall
Little, Brown and Co., 1963, 394 pp., $6.75

The mountain ballad is a sad song. Harry Caudill’s book has the tone of the ballad, the sound of the saga. The land of his story, the Southern mountains, is an American folk-land. There is no old-world atmosphere of warmth and community; men in the Cumberlands are not the natural men of romantic myth. The world of the mountains is a world of savage individualism among men who struggle for a livelihood and where the primary foe is man. Indeed, that struggle and the violence which attends it is one of the few breaks in the monotony and despair of life. In the Southern plateaus lonely men find a constant companion only in death, hear no words of approbation and no message of hope.

The Cumberland people are the passive men, those whose l...