Manly Wade Wellman: a Writer for the Ageless Hills

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Please welcome guest author Ron Roach. Dr. Roach is Chair and Professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University.  A native of North Carolina, he is from a family with deep roots in the mountains and music of Virginia and North Carolina.  Prior to joining the ETSU faculty in 2013, Dr. Roach served twelve years at Young Harris College in the north Georgia mountains, where he was Professor of Communication Studies and Vice President for Academic Affairs. “I am currently writing a detailed study of Manly Wellman’s ‘Silver John’ stories,” he says, “which stand out among the few works of fantasy fiction penned about the Appalachian region.”

Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) is one of the most prolific yet, ironically, little-known writers of Southern Appalachia.  An award-winning author and long-time resident of North Carolina, Wellman wrote a number of books and stories set in that state’s mountains, from history, to fantasy, to young adult fiction.  Wellman was born in West Africa, where his father was serving as a medical doctor, but spent most of his boyhood in the United States.  After earning degrees from what is now Wichita State University and from Columbia University, Wellman began his writing career in the late 1920s as a newspaper reporter in Kansas.

In 1930, he married a music student named Frances Obrist, who would be his lifelong partner and companion.  Wellman began writing science fiction, fantasy, and detective stories for pulp magazines in the late 1920s and was a prolific contributor to such magazines until the 1950s.  In particular, his work was regularly published in the pages of Weird Tales, where his name appeared beside such pioneers of science fiction as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Bloch.

Wellman became fascinated with Southern folklore during the 1920s and 30s and developed a close friendship with Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph.  Following World War Two, the Wellmans moved to North Carolina, where Manly began to focus much of his writing on the history and folklore of the region.  They eventually settled in Chapel Hill, which would be their home until their deaths.  Their son Wade would become a published poet and writer as well.  In the 1950s, Wellman, while continuing to publish in the pulps, began to focus on books, writing a number of historical fiction books for young adults, including a series set during the King’s Mountain campaign of the Revolutionary War.

Another of his series for young readers revolved around a colonial-era mountain settlement Wellman called Bear Paw Gap.  Wellman also wrote works of history for adults, including Giant in Gray, a biography of his namesake, Confederate General Wade Hampton.  Dead and Gone, a collection of essays about true crimes in North Carolina, won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.  Rebel Boast, which told the story of five Confederate soldiers from North Carolina, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Wellman became a close friend to well-known folk musician Obray Ramsay and built a cabin next to Ramsay’s place in the mountains of Madison County, North Carolina.  In 1973, Wellman wrote a history of the county, entitled The Kingdom of Madison.  The mountains of that area figured prominently in his most well-known fantasy stories, which featured a musician called Silver John.  John wandered the mountains of North Carolina, fighting evil with virtue, songs, and a guitar with silver strings.  From 1951 until shortly before his death in 1986, Wellman published 12 short stories, five novels, and seven short vignettes about John.

Manly Wade Wellman received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1980 and, in 1996, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.  The author, whose writings reflect his deep love for the Carolina mountains and the people he got to know there, deserves more recognition for his Appalachian writings.  His King Mountain series, while long out of print, can still be found in used bookstores and is an excellent way to introduce young readers to those landmark events that helped change the course of the Revolution.

The Silver John stories, which have been reissued in recent years, continue to appeal to modern readers who share Wellman’s love of supernatural tales, folk music, and the Appalachian mountains of a bygone day.  The Kingdom of Madison holds up well as an outstanding study of Southern Appalachia and was reprinted in 2001.  In the foreword to that edition, Ralph Roberts, who had read Wellman as a boy, validated the authenticity of Wellman’s mountain stories: “The place names were ones we know, the people are our people, the spirit is that of the ageless hills.  The mountain boy, for a while at least, thought Wellman was writing just for him, touching just his heart, and marveled.”[1]

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