Way Back When...Historical Fiction Set in West Virginia

Appalachian Patterns: stories Bo Ball

Stories that present the lives of mountain people in rural Appalachia in the 1930s and 1940s (Book Jacket)

Black Tickets Jayne Anne Phillips

Winner of the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, Phillips writes stories that lay bare the suffering and joy of the abused and the abandoned, the violent and the passive, the impoverished and the disenfranchised who populate the small towns and rural byways of the country. A patron of the arts reserves his fondest feeling for the one man who wants it least. A stripper, the daughter of a witch, escapes from poverty into another kind of violence. A young girl during the Depression is caught between the love of her crazy father and the no less powerful love of her sorrowful mother.

Clarinet Polka Keith Maillard

Returning to his Polish-American hometown, young Vietnam soldier Jimmy Koprowski feels stifled by the community's unpromising routines until his sister starts an all-girl polka band and sets in motion a series of events that helps him start to heal.

Cloudsplitter Russell Banks

Historical novel of John Brown. It covers in detail the anti-slavery movement of the 1840 through Bloody Kansas and culminating in Brown's insurrectionary raid on Harpers Ferry.

Deceiving Destiny Craig Skaggs

A family saga about a family from the Shenandoah Valley that escapes the destruction of the Union Army by moving to the hills of West Virginia. The story follows the fortunes of the Forsythe family through World War II.

Follow the River James Alexander Thom

Mary Ingles was 23, married and pregnant, when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement, killed the men and women and then took her captive. For months, she lived with them, unbroken, until she escaped and followed a thousand mile trail to freedom - an extraordinary story of a pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her people.

Gloria Keith Maillard

Despite her prosperous, high-society family background, popularity, and beauty, Gloria finds herself dissatisfied with her life as she faces her final summer at home during the late 1950s before setting out to conquer the world beyond her horizon.

The Madam Julianna Baggott

Baggott journeys back in her family history to forge a tale of living in Marrowtown, West Virginia, during the 1920s and 1930s. Marrowtown is a gritty place of backbreaking labor, moonshine, abandoned children and men who beat women and women who fight back. Alma is overwhelmed by the demands of her husband and three children and exhausted by her work at the factory and also running a boardinghouse. So she rejects the unjust work of thankless toil and starts her own business, a brothel. Insights in selling sex, women's depthless capacity for improvisation in a fight for survival and to defend loved ones shine forth.

The Midwife's Tale Gretchen Laskas

Serving as midwives to the residents of a small mining town in prewar Appalachia, Elizabeth and her mother share in the intimate details of the lives of every family in the region, but none of their neighbors know their own secrets and desires.

Spring Again Gladys Jones

Sara Renfrew returns to America from to Paris to marry, the heritage of strong sense of honor and responsibility. However, the pre-arranged world of this Southern woman is thrown into reality by the events of the day. Set in the turbulent 1960s as well as flashbacks to the 1860s.

Storming Heaven Denise Giardina

In the Battle of Blair Mountain, West Virginia, in the early 20th century, coal miners fight for unionization under the leadership of Rondal Lloyd and Carrie Bishop, a nurse who helps him before and after her husband's death.

Sugarlands Foster Mullenax

Biographical novel chronicles the life story of his parents and it is set on the family's hillside farm in Sugarlands near Parsons and Thomas in Tucker County.