Harry M. Caudill (b. Whitesburg, Kentucky, May 3, 1922; d. November 29, 1990) was an American author, historian, lawyer, legislator, and environmentalist from Letcher County, in the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky.
He served in World War II and was elected three times as to the Kentucky State House of Representatives.
A common theme explored in many of Caudill's writings is the historic underdevelopment of the Appalachian region (particularly his own home area of southeastern Kentucky). In several of his books (most prominently Night Comes to the Cumberlands, 1963) and many of his published articles, he probes the historical poverty of the region, which he attributes in large part to the rapacious policies of the coal mining industries active in the region, as well as their backers: bankers of the northeastern United States. He notes that such interests most often had their headquarters not in Appalachia but in the Northeast or Midwest, and thus failed to properly reinvest their sizable profits in the Appalachian region. In his later years he became an active opponent of the rapidly growing practice of strip mining, which he believed was causing irreparable harm to the land and its people. He spoke out and published in many magazines about the subject.
He also produced several volumes of folklore and oral history, which he collected himself from residents of the area centering around Letcher County and Harlan County, Kentucky.
Caudill killed himself with a gunshot to the head in 1990, faced with an advancing case of Parkinson's Disease.
The Harry M. Caudill Library located in Whitesburg, Kentucky, the main library of the Letcher County Public Library District, is named for Caudill.
Books
- Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963). ISBN 0316132128
Discusson
Night Comes to the Cumberlands contains an amazing mix of historical fact and author's insights. Mr. Caudill's personal notes come from his own family ties, that he explicitly explains that early in the book. Throughout, Mr. Caudill has woven together the overarching cultural and political activities of the times along with the day-to-day activities of the Cumberland people. His language is consistently spare and easy to read, but the rich material he describes is inherently moving...even exciting. Here are 2 closing paragraphs of Chapter Three:
- Perhaps in no other region of the United States except the Southern mountains were the lives and property of a great number of pro-Union civilians lost in the (Civil) war. In Pennslyvania, Kansas and a few other border areas the people were subjected to occasional Confederate forays, but those areas were comparetively rich and the losses were soon restored. But in the highlands much of the modest and slowly-built-up accumulations of three generations were destroyed, imporverishing virtually the entire population.
- Thus the curtain rose upon one of the most fantastic dramas in American History--the ferocious Kentucky mountain feuds. Their story has gone largely unchronicled, but in savagery and stark horror they dwarf the cattle wars of the Great Plains and, by contrast, make the vendettas of Sicily look like children's parlor games.
External links