The difference extends beyond the crafts and activities. What really got me was being re-connected to an Appalachian culture that I was lucky enough to have a little connection to when I was a kid, through friends of the family, Ellison and Mary Linda Smyth. But although that was cool, it wasn't what really got me about the book. It is in significant part a practical book covering topics ranging from building a log cabin to pickling vegetables, and initially, I felt most excited about learning those things. (Especially since my dad has all of them sitting on his bookshelves.) I loved it, of course. Several collections of recorded music from the local area were released.Īs someone from Appalachia who's into DIY stuff, I'm surprised it took me this long to read this book. In addition, special collections were published, including The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery, Foxfire: 25 Years, A Foxfire Christmas, and The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Toys and Games. (The project transferred to the local public school in 1977.) Over the years, the schools published eleven other volumes. The first anthology of collected Foxfire articles was published in book form in 1972, and achieved best-seller status. The magazine began to reach a national audience and became quite popular.

Topics included all manner of folklife practices and customs associated with farming and the rural life of southern Appalachia, as well as the folklore and oral history of local residents. They published the histories and articles in a small magazine format beginning in 1967. Wigginton began a writing project based on his students' collecting oral histories from local residents and writing them up. In 1966, he began teaching English in the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, located in the Appalachian Mountains of northeastern Georgia. He earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English from Cornell University and a second Master's from Johns Hopkins University. His maternal grandmother, Margaret Pollard Smith, was an associate professor of English at Vassar College and his father was a famous landscape architect, also named Brooks Eliot Wiggington. His mother, Lucy Freelove Smith Wiggington, died eleven days later of 'pneunomia due to acute pulmary edema,' according to her death certificate. Wigginton was born in West Virginia on November 9, 1942. In 1986 he was named 'Georgia Teacher of the Year' and in 1989 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

These were based on articles by high school students from Rabun County, Georgia. He was most widely known for developing the Foxfire Project, a writing project that led to a magazine and the series of best-selling Foxfire books, twelve volumes in all. Eliot Wigginton (born Brooks Eliot Wigginton) is an American oral historian, folklorist, writer and former educator.

The Foxfire Book by Eliot Wigginton