Saturday Review: “‘What the mountains and forests did for me’: A Fine Collection of Kephart’s Words” a review by Rebecca Godwin of Mae Miller Claxton and George Frizzel’s collection Horace Kephart: Writings in NCLR Online Winter 2025
Rebecca Godwin reviews this recent collection of Kephart’s writing, much pulled from the author’s papers at Western Carolina University. According to Godwin, “In Horace Kephart: Writings, George Frizzell and Mae Miller Claxton allow us a deeper dive into the journey of this nature aficionado who argued for the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as well as the Appalachian Trail.”
Claxton and Frizzel’s collection broadly encompasses Kephart’s legacy, and according to Godwin, “It makes available hard-to-find journal articles, speeches, and letters. It introduces us to George Masa, the Japanese photographer based in Asheville who traveled with Kephart, taking pictures used to lobby for the national park. It sets readers into the early twentieth-century world of little magazines that shaped movements and citizens’ relationship to their country. Kephart fulfilled his mission to highlight the relationship between humans and the natural world. Here are lines from an article published in National Sportsman in April 1931, the same month he died: “What the mountains and forests did for me they can do for other rundown folks – and then they, too, will be enthusiasts; for one just can’t be stolid or despondent when his lungs are full of mountain air and his blood is coursing free” (629). Frizzell, Claxton, and all the other contributors to this collection also fulfilled their goal, sharing Kephart’s significant environmental and literary legacy.” Sounds like his writing and advocacy are still in much need today.
Read the entire review in the NCLR Online Winter 2025 issue out now! Order Horace Kephart: Writings on the University of Tennessee Press website.
