Jesse Stuart's sister was "a beautiful, blue-eyed girl of 19" when she took over the job of teaching the one-room school at a place he chooses to call Lonesome Valley, Ky. She came home shortly after that a nervous wreck. Among other things, one of her gangling first-graders, a teen-ager named Guy Hawkins, had blacked her eyes and "whipped her before the Lonesome Valley pupils."
That was the main reason 16-year-old Jesse Stuart decided to be a schoolteacher. He asked for, and got, his sister's old job. In time, he became county school superintendent, later quit to concentrate on farming and writing...
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