Richard Chase and May Justus may seem like very different figures in the history of children’s literature. The Jack Tales by Chase, published in 1943, was named a Touchstone of children’s literature by ChLA in the 1980s and is still among the most popular folktale collections in North America. His tales from several collections are often reprinted and cited as an influence in current oral and written retellings of American folktales. He was an eccentric self-promoter who made countless appearances around the country as a storyteller, festival organizer, and lecturer, eager to revive the practice of British-American folk arts. May Justus is much less famous, even among children’s literature enthusiasts, as her books are out of print and she had a quieter life as a rural teacher in the Smoky Mountains. Nevertheless, these two authors of regional books for young readers also have much in common. They lived through the same decades (Chase 1904-88 and Justus 1898-1989) and wrote children’s books through the mid-twentieth century that were read from coast to coast. While compiling complete bibliographies for both authors in my web site AppLit, I found that relatively little had been written about them in spite of their long careers and popularity with readers.
Justus, an activist who opposed discrimination, wrote two stories that were probably the first books for early readers about desegregation: New Boy in School (1963) and A New Home for Billy (1966). For nearly forty years she wrote about sixty-five books of fiction and poetry for children and young adults, most set in Smoky Mountain cabins, schools and communities like the ones where she grew up, later taught school, and worked with children in her home. Although most of her fiction is realistic, while Chase’s books and recordings were filled with folklore he collected as an adult, mainly in southern Appalachia, Justus also used folklore in nearly every story. She adapted regional tall tales and folktales in realistic settings in several books and compiled a collection called The Complete Peddler's Pack: Games, Songs, Rhymes, and Riddles from Mountain Folklore. She learned ballads from her mother and fiddle tunes from her father. Whether they are in a story’s background or central to the plot, traditional songs and rhymes appear often, sometimes with musical scores. Considering the persistence in our society of negative images of southern Appalachia still prevalent among adults, it is noteworthy that her well-written stories dating back to 1928 contain very little that seems outdated or stereotypical. They may be somewhat idealized, like other children’s books before the age of New Realism—her orphans and stray dogs almost always find warm shelters and kind caregivers, outsiders are usually sympathetic—but characters do suffer from poverty and social injustice while retaining their dignity as individuals. Justus said, "If my own stories and books have a lasting value it is, I hope, in the field of regional literature,” which “preserve[s] the history of a people to whom I belong, with whom I am glad to claim kin as a Tennessee Mountaineer" (quoted in Elementary English 41). An elderly storyteller in Chase’s Grandfather Tales says about “the old ways” that when “this new generation . . . find the old songs and the old tales, they’ll delight in ‘em” (231). Both Justus and Chase worked tirelessly to fulfill their dreams and visions of enriching the lives of American children by passing on stories from Appalachia that have universal appeal and meaning.
