Down the Ravine

Mary Noailles Murfree was an American author of novels and short stories who wrote under the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock. She is considered by many to be Appalachias first significant female writer and her work a necessity for the study of Appalachian literature although a number of characters in her work reinforce negative stereotypes about the region. She has been favorably compared to Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett creating post-Civil War American local-color literature. The town of Murfreesboro Tennessee is named after Murfrees great-grandfather Colonel Hardy Murfree who fought in the Revolutionary War. She had begun writing stories for Appletons Journal under the penname of Charles Egbert Craddock and by 1878 she was contributing to the Atlantic Monthly. It was not until seven years later in May 1885 that Murfree divulged that she was Charles Egbert Craddock to Thomas Bailey Aldrich an editor at the Atlantic Monthly. Murfree visited the Montvale Springs resort near Knoxville from 1886. Although she became known for the realism of her accounts in fact she was from a wealthy family and would have had little contact with the local people while staying at the resorts.