author

James Stokely

1913–1977

A Tennessee poet and nonfiction writer, he worked closely with Wilma Dykeman on books that explored Appalachia, the South, and the struggle over race in mid-20th-century America. Their collaborations are remembered for being observant, grounded, and deeply engaged with the region they knew firsthand.

1 Audiobook

At home in the Smokies : $b a history handbook for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina and Tennessee

At home in the Smokies : $b a history handbook for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina and Tennessee

by United States. National Park Service, Wilma Dykeman, James Stokely

About the author

Born in 1913, James R. Stokely Jr. was a writer from Newport, Tennessee. Reliable sources about him are limited, but several literary and historical references describe him as a poet and nonfiction writer, and note that he lived in East Tennessee with his wife, author Wilma Dykeman.

He is best known as Dykeman’s collaborator on a number of important books. These included Neither Black Nor White (1957), a widely noted book on Southern race relations, Seeds of Southern Change, a study of reformer Will Alexander, Prophet of Plenty, and The Border States. Other records also connect him with writing about the Great Smoky Mountains and Southern regional history.

Stokely died in 1977. While his public profile seems to have remained quieter than Dykeman’s, the record that does survive shows a writer closely tied to Appalachian life and to a body of work that took the modern South seriously, especially its landscapes, people, and moral conflicts.