The Thread That Runs So True by Jesse Stuart

First published: 1949

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: The 1920’s and 1930’s

Locale: Rural Kentucky

Principal Personage:

• Jesse Stuart, a teacher and writer

Form and Content

Jesse Stuart was only sixteen when he began his teaching career at the one-room Lonesome Valley School in rural Kentucky. He had not planned on a teaching career and, in fact, had not completed his own high school education at the time. Nevertheless, having gone by mistake into a room where the county school board was testing teacher candidates, he decided to try the exam. He passed it and received a second-class certificate, which permitted him to teach the lower grades. He chose to go to Lonesome Valley School because his older sister had taught there and had been beaten up by the school bullies; Stuart enjoyed a challenge. In The Thread That Runs So True, he tells of the challenges he faced as a classroom teacher and school administrator in the Kentucky rural school system of the Depression years.

At Lonesome Valley School, Stuart learned how to engage his students’ interest and win their respect. He learned how to improvise in a classroom when books and supplies were not available. He learned how to help his students apply their lessons to their everyday tasks and take pride in their accomplishments. Finally, he experienced the frustration of coping with politically elected school trustees, sometimes themselves illiterate, who ruled the teachers and curriculum in accordance with their private wishes.

After his initiation at Lonesome Valley, Stuart went on to obtain his own high school diploma. He then worked his way through Lincoln Memorial University in three years and received a baccalaureate degree in 1929. He took a straight academic program, not a teacher-training course, because he did not intend to go into teaching as a career. He thought to combine farming in his Kentucky homeland with a career of writing about the richness of life there. He left Lincoln Memorial in debt, however, and had to seek more immediate sources of income. Stuart worked for a year in the local steel mill but subsequently was persuaded to become the only teacher in a fourteen-student, rural high school for one hundred dollars per month. Though he had to scramble to keep ahead of them in their courses, his students excelled, winning prizes in competitions with larger and better financed high schools in the city system. Stuart became committed to fighting rural illiteracy and the impoverished, politicized school system that perpetuated it.

At the age of twenty-three, Stuart became a high school principal and began coping with underpaid teachers, opinionated parents, and a stubborn, miserly school board. With persistence and characteristic innovation, he dealt with these problems and helped make the school notable for its prizewinning students. At the same time, he took graduate courses in education and, as a result, was constantly in debt. When the school board rejected his request for an annual salary of fifteen hundred dollars, he decided to leave the teaching profession. He attended Vanderbilt University to complete a master’s degree, but when all his clothes and his thesis were destroyed in a dormitory fire, he hitchhiked home without completing his program.

The following year, Stuart, at age twenty-four, accepted an appointment as superintendent of the rural school district in which he had grown up and taught. He found the system staggering under debts and competing with a city system for students and the state subsidy that went with them. He had to cope with an antiquated trustee system in which 246 elected rural trustees, many of them illiterate, tried to rule the local schools like petty dictators.

Confronting these problems head-on, he created such a controversy that his school district became involved in thirty-two lawsuits, winning “thirty-one and one-half.” His life was even threatened, and many of his friends avoided him in public. He found consolation in writing poetry and fiction about the rich life of the Kentucky hill people, and he published the first of his twenty-eight books, The Harvest of Youth, in 1930. With the 1934 publication of his second work, a collection of poems titled Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow, his writing began to sell; he became a sought-after public speaker, traveling to many states beyond his native Kentucky. On the basis of his published stories and poems, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent fourteen months in Europe. On his return home, he was married to his local sweetheart and returned to the struggle to improve Kentucky’s education system.

In The Thread That Runs So True, a first-person narrative, Stuart enriches the story of his own education and development with a deep appreciation for his students and their accomplishments. They come alive as he conveys the richness of their speech and personalities. The book’s title and chapter headings are taken from a folk song which the children would sing at Lonesome Valley School. With a poet’s eye, Stuart captures the beauty and the aching hardships of the Kentucky hills. With candor, he analyzes the causes and impact of the neglect of rural schools that ranked the state next to last among the national school systems.

The book is divided into six sections of unequal length, each one subdivided into internal numbered chapters. Each of the six main sections deals with a different theme or stage of Stuart’s learning about education. The subsections resemble individual short stories or essays. The autobiography follows a chronological pattern, but Stuart never subordinates narrative to time. Moreover, he does not allow himself to come between the reader and the community he describes; he functions as a guide, but the experiences he chooses to highlight help the reader to understand the unique culture and special problems of the Kentucky hill people. Ever sensitive to them, Stuart has disguised the names of the places and persons he depicts, thereby giving the work more artistic and analytical freedom.

Critical Context

Because of Jesse Stuart’s stature as a unique and beloved author, The Thread That Runs So True has an assured place in American literature. What makes this work especially noteworthy is Stuart’s use of it to make his case for public school education. Seldom have professional educators had at their side an author of such repute and, even more important, such wide and verifiable experience in the schools. Stuart has used his material strategically, couching it in writing so enjoyable that students, teachers, parents, administrators, and politicians can see the importance of their role in public education without being alienated by dull or preachy writing. In his selection of events and personalities, Stuart manipulates both his materials and his readers to make his case.

Stuart presented this work at a time when the nation was prepared to deal with the problem of illiteracy. Published in 1949, when the nation was recovering from decades of economic depression and war, The Thread That Runs So True reached a national audience eager to address the issues of education. Accordingly, the book was brought into the classroom by multitudes of teachers and was placed on recommended-reading lists. Students were inspired, teachers encouraged, and general readers informed by this gentle and enjoyable expose. For contemporary readers, The Thread That Runs So True remains a masterful example of the writer’s craft. It captures for all time the essence of the Appalachian heritage and remains an eloquent statement of the value of public education.

Bibliography

Blair, Everetta Love. Jesse Stuart: His Life and Works, 1967.

Clarke, Mary Washington. Jesse Stuart’s Kentucky, 1968.

Gilpin, John R., Jr. The Man . . . Jesse Stuart: Poet, Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Educator, 1977.

Herndon, Jerry A. Land of the Honey-Colored Wind: Jesse Stuart’s Kentucky, a Resource Book, 1981.

Richardson, Edward H. Jesse: The Biography of an American Writer, Jesse Hilton Stuart, 1984.