These thirteen stories reflect different dimensions of the human spirit. Hugh in “The Moonshiner,” Maggie in “The Fight,” and George in “The Drunkard” show remarkable courage when facing physical danger. Myra Lu in “Dyin’ on Time” and John in “The Lost Summer” reveal admirable endurance when facing adversity. In “Talking to the Dead” and “The Strange Requests,” the Reverends Calahan and Hester struggle against superstition and disbelief. Zack in “The Chicken Thieves” discovers that crime doesn’t pay. And characters in “Grandma Excie’s Exit,” “Summer Porch Talk,” “The Prayers” and other stories confront life’s complexities of sadness, joy, humor, pain and death. The setting for these stories: southeastern North Carolina. The time: the depression decade of the thirties.

"Lewis R. Redmond was an archetypal moonshiner. On March 1, 1876, the twenty-one-year-old North Carolinian shot and killed a U.S. deputy marshal who tried to arrest him on charges of illicit distilling. He then fled to Pickens County, South Carolina, where, within three years, he gained national notoriety as the "King of the Moonshiners." More than any other individual moonshiner in southern Appalachia, Redmond captured the imagination of middle-class Americans. Then, as now, media coverage had a lot to do with his reputation.".

If you fell in love with 1960s North Carolina when reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, Donna Everhart’s The Moonshiner’s Daughter will transport you right back. Everhart’s sensitive and expert storytelling will capture you in this Southern coming-of-age novel! Set in North Carolina in 1960 and brimming with authenticity and grit, The Moonshiner’s Daughter evokes the singular life of sixteen-year-old Jessie Sasser, a young woman determined to escape her family’s past . . . Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that belongs to Jessie Sasser’s daddy, but Jessie wants no part of it. As far as she’s concerned, moonshine caused her mother’s death a dozen years ago. Her father refuses to speak about her mama, or about the day she died. But Jessie has a gnawing hunger for the truth—one that compels her to seek comfort in food. Yet all her self-destructive behavior seems to do is feed what her school’s gruff but compassionate nurse describes as the “monster” inside Jessie. Resenting her father’s insistence that moonshining runs in her veins, Jessie makes a plan to destroy the stills, using their neighbors as scapegoats. Instead, her scheme escalates an old rivalry and reveals long-held grudges. As she endeavors to right wrongs old and new, Jessie’s loyalties will bring her to unexpected revelations about her family, her strengths—and a legacy that may provide her with the answers she has been longing for.

Homemade liquor has played a prominent role in the Appalachian economy for nearly two centuries. The region endured profound transformations during the extreme prohibition movements of the nineteenth century, when the manufacturing and sale of alcohol -- an integral part of daily life for many Appalachians -- was banned. In Moonshiners and Prohibitionists: The Battle over Alcohol in Southern Appalachia, Bruce E. Stewart chronicles the social tensions that accompanied the region's early transition from a rural to an urban-industrial economy. Stewart analyzes the dynamic relationship of the bootleggers and opponents of liquor sales in western North Carolina, as well as conflict driven by social and economic development that manifested in political discord. Stewart also explores the life of the moonshiner and the many myths that developed around hillbilly stereotypes. A welcome addition to the New Directions in Southern History series, Moonshiners and Prohibitionists addresses major economic, social, and cultural questions that are essential to the understanding of Appalachian history.

The definitive biography of Appalachian moonshiner Popcorn Sutton, filled with color photography, exclusive interviews, historical background, and extensive accounts of his life and times.

On vacation in Florida, Ricky Kidd finds himself in a nightmare adventure that heads deep into the Everglades in this youth adventure series.

In Canadian, Texas, in 1927, not long after his father's death, Riley and his fiddle-playing grandfather must find a way to save the family ranch from a group of moonshiners and the men behind their operation.

Moonshiner's Daughter is the early life story of a young girl raised in the some of the most remote, backwoods parts of Haywood County, North Carolina, deep in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains. Her father, an ardent moonshiner when he wasn't in prison, and her mother, often showing mental illness from an earlier brain injury, raised their four children in some of the grimmest circumstances that you will ever read about. Mary Judith Messer eventually escaped her extreme living conditions by going to live with a family as their mother's helper near Washington, DC. She then moved to New York City to live with her older sister who had run away from a forced marriage. The memoir Moonshiner's Daughter is told through the eyes and words of a barely educated child and teenager yet their meaning and descriptions are clear as a mountain stream. She changed the names of most people and places to protect her still living family members. Authors Robert Morgan & Ron Rash give recommendations.

For 25 years, Tom Allison was a revenuer, a federal agent charged with enforcement of the nation’s laws on taxation of liquor. His territory was the hills, hollows and deep woods of Alabama, and his quarry was the illegal whiskey makers. Allison remembers the stake-outs in the brush, the undercover assignments, the long waits to catch the distillery operators red-handed, and, of course, the chases as he and his fellow treasury agents ran down fleeing moonshiners in the dark of night. While Allison is a natural story-teller, the characters who populate this history are too strange to be fiction. Perhaps the only thing more striking than the ignorance of many of the moonshiners is the craftiness of some others.

"Following the end of Prohibition in 1933, demand for moonshine remained high due to taxes imposed on large liquor producers. Seeking to answer this demand were the distillers of Appalachia who, having established illegal networks of moonshine distribution under Prohibition, continued their activities and effectively skirted the federal liquor tax scheme. Spirits of Just Men chronicles the Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935, held in Franklin County, Virginia, a place that many still refer to as the "Moonshine Capital of the World." While the trial itself made national news, Thompson uses the event as a stepping-off point to explore Blue Ridge Mountain culture, economy, and political engagement in the 1930 illustrating how participation in the moonshine trade was a rational and savvy choice for farmers and community members struggling to maintain their way of life amidst the pressures of the Great Depression and pull of the timber and coal-mining industries in Virginia. Through Thompson's prose, local characters come alive as he pays particular attention to the stories of a key witness for the defense, Miss Ora Harrison, an Episcopalian missionary to the region, and Elder Goode Hash, itinerant Primitive Baptist preacher and juror in a related murder trial. Thompson explores how local religious belief both clashed with and condoned the moonshine trade and how stills and the trade enabled a distinctive cultural formation in the region that goes far beyond the hillbilly stereotype alive today. Not only is his work is based on extensive oral histories and local archival material, but Thompson himself is from the area and his grandparents were involved in not only the moonshine trade but the trial as well"--Provided by publisher.