Folks Do Get Born

New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc, 1946. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Fair. 9x6x1. Leighton, Clare. Signed by author. First edition. Signed without inscription by illustrator Clare Leighton on half-title page. Includes original jacket with $3.00 price on flap. Ink name stamp on front endpaper, board edges slightly faded, otherwise book is very well preserved. Jacket well worn with large internal chip from spine, minor loss from corners, and a few cello tape repairs. 1946 Hard Cover. x, 245 pp. About the author: "Marie Campbell, author and prominent folklore scholar, was born in Tamms, Illinois on February 17, 1907. In the summer of 1926, nineteen-year-old Campbell left her home to take a teaching position with the Hindman Settlement School at Caney Creek in Knott County, Kentucky. The following fall she accepted a position with the school at Gander (now Carcassone) in Letcher County, Kentucky. It was at these locations that she was first introduced to the rich oral tradition of Kentucky mountain people. Between 1926 and 1940 Campbell collected stories, many of which were local variations on European folk tales, Irish mythology, and other stories with classical origins. She also participated in local events such as quilting bees, square dances, and church meetings, and even corn-shucking, bean-stringing, or apple-peeling gatherings. What she captured through her notes were stories passed down by family members who for more than a century were largely isolated from outside society. In the 1930s Campbell started publishing articles on folklore while working as a high school English teacher. She received an A.B. in education from Southern Illinois Teachers College in 1932 and an M.A. in English from George Peabody College in 1937. In 1940, Campbell started teaching English, folklore, and creative writing at West Georgia College, Peabody College, Alabama Laboratory School, and Carollton High School in Georgia. During the summers she worked with the Kentucky Crippled Children's Commission making home visits. Campbell published her first collection of southern Appalachian folk tales, Cloud-Walking, in 1942. Two years later in 1944, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts - Fiction to support further research. Over the next decade Campbell produced Folks Do Get Born (1946), an account of African American midwives in rural Georgia, and A House with Stairs (1950), a novel about an African-American family in Alabama during the Civil War. Additionally, she published many articles in magazines and journals such as Southern Literary Messenger, Journal of American Folklore, Southern Folklore Quarterly, American Cookery, Childhood Education, School Activities, and the Tennessee Folklore Bulletin. In 1956 Campbell finished a Ph.D. in folklore and comparative literature from Indiana University. During this time she taught at Glassboro State College in New Jersey, Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Campbell published a second collection of southern Appalachian folk tales, Tales of the Cloud Walking Country, in 1958. At the time of her death, Dr. Campbell was an emeritus professor of Folklore and English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst." - University of Kentucky Libraries