CHARLES EGBERT

See also:

• CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK (1850– )

CRADDOCK (1850– )  , the pen-name of MARY NOAILLES MURFREE, American author, who was born near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on the 24th of January r85o, the great-granddaughter of Col . Hardy Murfree . She was crippled in childhood by paralysis . She attended school in Nashville and Philadelphia . Spending her summers in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, she came to know the primitive people there with whose life her writings deal . She contributed to Appleton's Journal, and, first in 1878, to The Atlantic Monthly . No one, apparently, suspected that the author of these stories was a woman, and her identity was not disclosed until 1885, a year after the publication of her first volume of short stories, In the Tennessee Mountains . She deals mainly with the narrow, stern life of the Tennessee mountaineers, who, left behind in the advance of civilization, live amid traditions and customs, and speak a dialect, peculiarly their own; and her work abounds in exquisite descriptions of scenery .