A Cumberland Vendetta

A Kentucky mountain feud, told from inside: two families, a killing nobody now remembers the reason for, and a boy who falls in love across the line. Fox left New York for the coalfields and lived among these families for years before writing them; the dialect is transcribed, not invented, and the book refuses the sentimentality that made his later ones famous. Fifty-nine plates of American painting, from Homer and Bierstadt to the Rockies and the Yellowstone geysers, carry the mountain scale and hard light of the feud's own country.