A Slow Life But a Good Life: Stories from the South Carolina Mountains - Paperback

by John M. Coggeshall (Author)

A Slow Life but A Good Life describes a time when good stories served as a primary source of entertainment and information. Over the past several decades, Coggeshall has collected numerous stories about the lives of long-term residents in the South Carolina mountain counties. This book presents these stories, along with a discussion of the social context of storytelling and an overview of the dialect in which the stories are told. Since the contributors range in age from their twenties into their nineties, the stories document nearly a century of life in this part of the state. Stories are arranged by topics, and describe rural life, food procurement and preparation, traditional cures and curing, social life and activities, four schools, couples, and local characters and practical jokes. An introductory chapter presents the physical and social background of the area. One appendix presents brief biographies of the contributors, and a second one provides a list of unusual words used in the stories.

Author Biography

I think the five most important marketing distinctions with my book are (1) these are actual stories

(not fiction); (2) the stories are contextualized - that is, I provide an overview of the physical and

cultural environment for the stories, helping outsiders to understand the place from which the

stories emanate; (3) the stories are arranged by topics and also chronologically -- they are not a

random collection of anecdotes; (4) I provide brief biographies of the contributors so readers can

contextualize the stories by person; (5) I provide a reader-friendly discussion of the current

literature on the dialect of the stories, further contextualizing them.