The folk remedy section also includes additional information on basket-weaving, and an interview with a contact who. This is probably the most picture-heavy Foxfire book so far in the series. Some of these topics (wagon building, quilting, and log cabins in particular) are best enjoyed after reading on these topics in the earlier volumes they are light on process and heavy of pictures and drawings. Several collections of recorded music from the local area were released.įoxfire 9 was the last of the original run of Foxfire anthologies, and many of the sections read like addendums to sections found in previous Foxfire books: Folk remedies, wagon building, quilting, mountain religion, haint tales, and log cabin construction are all given additional space in this book. In addition, special collections were published, including The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery, Foxfire: 25 Years, A Foxfire Christmas, and The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Toys and Games. (The project transferred to the local public school in 1977.) Over the years, the schools published eleven other volumes. The first anthology of collected Foxfire articles was published in book form in 1972, and achieved best-seller status. The magazine began to reach a national audience and became quite popular. Topics included all manner of folklife practices and customs associated with farming and the rural life of southern Appalachia, as well as the folklore and oral history of local residents. They published the histories and articles in a small magazine format beginning in 1967. Wigginton began a writing project based on his students' collecting oral histories from local residents and writing them up. In 1966, he began teaching English in the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, located in the Appalachian Mountains of northeastern Georgia. He earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English from Cornell University and a second Master's from Johns Hopkins University.

His maternal grandmother, Margaret Pollard Smith, was an associate professor of English at Vassar College and his father was a famous landscape architect, also named Brooks Eliot Wiggington. His mother, Lucy Freelove Smith Wiggington, died eleven days later of 'pneunomia due to acute pulmary edema,' according to her death certificate. Wigginton was born in West Virginia on November 9, 1942. In 1986 he was named 'Georgia Teacher of the Year' and in 1989 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. These were based on articles by high school students from Rabun County, Georgia. He was most widely known for developing the Foxfire Project, a writing project that led to a magazine and the series of best-selling Foxfire books, twelve volumes in all.

This is book number 1 in the Foxfire Series series.Eliot Wigginton (born Brooks Eliot Wigginton) is an American oral historian, folklorist, writer and former educator.

The Foxfire Book by Eliot Wigginton