The Hawk's Done Gone - (Vintage Vanderbilt) by Mildred Haun (Paperback)

About the Book

Set in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, Haun's stories of Appalachian life capture the forceful simplicity of the legends and ballads that still live in the rural hollows.

Book Synopsis

The stores of Mildred Haun, collected here for the first time, are unique in the annals of American literature. Set in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee and covering a span of family history from the Civil War to 1940, these tales achieve the forceful, intractable simplicity of the traditional ballads. But one also finds in these twenty-three stories an overview of the forces of nature, the paradoxes inherent in the human condition, and a full acceptance of the real world and the supernatural.

Born to the milieu about which she wrote, Mildred Haun recorded a world which combined stark natural phenomena and passionate supernatural forces. And because the supernatural is woven into the dramatic fabric of the stories, it contributes, paradoxically, to the final credibility of events.

Few writers in the twentieth century have set down so rich and complex a rendering of folk tradition and such a comprehensive treatment of superstition in the southern Appalachians. In these tales we meet a talking apple tree, a boy with the "hant bleach" of doom upon his brow, a bleeding ghost, a child's winding sheet wet with tears, and God's revelation in a blue bird.

No other dialect collection from the South has been as close to the oral tradition or has achieved the same distinctive flavor and natural tonal qualities. The speech strikes the ear directly from the printed page. The language is simple and strong. A sparse, direct economy prevails. The total impact is explosive.

Although Miss Haun dramatized themes of cruelty, revenge, and the loss of personal dignity in a harsh world, the comic tales in this volume call to mind the Native American humor of the Old Southwest and demonstrate that a female humorist, without coyness or bawdry, can hold her own alongside Davy Crockett, Sut Lovingood, and the nameless spinners of tall tales.

From the Back Cover

'The human predicament done in terms of a natural world, which does not forbid the supernatural. Mildred Haun has the true sense of a certain people, removed from a (so-called) more advanced kind of society.' Andrew lytle, editor, Sewanee Review In 1940 'The Hawk's Done Gone, ' a family chronicle told from the point of view of a mountain midwife, was published by Bobbs-Merrill. This volume brings that collection back into print and extends the chronicle with ten more stories, eight of them previously unpublished.

Review Quotes

"A very important book." Allen Tate

--Allen Tate

"Nothing exactly like it [The Hawks Done Gone] has ever before appeared in American literature. Perhaps it is a fair description to say that it resembles old ballads done in a prose medium; it has the same compound of somber tragedy, rollicking humor and feeling for the strange and unusual. It is always close to real life, and is indeed realistic in the best sense, but it is not mere reporting. In it the imagination rules, and the old art of storytelling comes again into its own. Above all it is full of a supernaturalism that is never the mere exploitation of odd superstitions and folk beliefs." Donald Davidson

--Donald Davidson

These are stories, strongly imaginative and excellently told, by a talented writer who used material real enough for ballads in that appropriate setting where balladry has made a last stand.
--Robert Van Gelder

The human predicament done in terms of a natural world, which does not forbid the supernatural. Mildred Haun has the true sense of a certain people, removed from a (so-called) more advanced kind of society.
--Andrew Lytle, Sewanee Review

About the Author

MILDRED HAUN was born in Hamblen County, Tennessee in 1911. She grew up in Haun Hollow, Hoot Owl District, Cocke County, in a big family of hardy, independent mountain kin, most of them hillside farmers.

She grew up hearing the proverbs and rich lore of the mountains; she was early taught to read the signs that nature provides the wary and discerning eye.

She began writing fiction as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University. After a distinguished career at the Department of Agriculture, she died in 1966.

HERSCHEL GOWER, the editor of the volume, was a friend of the late Mildred Haun. Name as her literary executor, he is Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University where he teaches courses in the ballad, the lyric, and American literature.

A native of Nashville, Professor Gower was graduated from Cumberland University and received the master's degree and the doctorate from Vanderbilt University. He spent 1954-56 in Scotland doing postgraduate study at the University of Edinburgh and has recently returned from a sabbatical year spent at the School of Scottish Studies.

The winner of an Award of Merit from the American Association for the State and Local History for Pen and Sword: The Life and Journals of Randal W. McGavock, Professor Gower is co-editor of The Sense of Fiction, and a contributor to Reality and Myth. His articles and poems have appeared in several journals.