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Harry Humes carved out a unique place in American literature by chronicling Appalachian working-class life, natural landscapes, and disappearing rural traditions in Appalachian Pennsylvania with rare lyricism, humility, and precision. He wrote unflinchingly about the austerity and horrors of extraction as well as his deep connection with family and the area mountains and valleys not gutted by the anthracite coal industry.

This volume of Humes’s new and selected poems not only preserves the work of a significant American poet, offering scholars, teachers, and general readers a generous overview of the clarity, beauty, craft, and emotional depth of his substantial body of work. It allows future generations to rediscover poetry that deepens our understanding of how our labor, our landscapes, and our love shape us and change the ways we live and what we care about.

In June 1854 the Grand Excursion celebrated in festive style the completion of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad to the Mississippi River. Hundreds of dignitaries including newspaper editors and other journalists; politicians; academics, writers and artists; business and industry leaders; and railroad officials were among those who traveled by rail from Chicago to Rock Island, Illinois, then by steamboat to St. Paul in Minnesota Territory. The travelers were shown a region undergoing rapid settlement by Europeans—an area of great natural beauty offering many promises for additional development.

One hundred and fifty years later, the thirteen essays in this volume examine the activities and environments of the 1854 Grand Excursion and place them in the context of an evolving regional identity for the Upper Mississippi River Valley based on the economy, culture, geography, and history of the area. In a series of “excursions,” the contributors explore the building of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad, eastern newspaper accounts of the 1854 excursion, steamboating, the area’s pictorial landscape, passenger trains along the scenic river, the genesis and features of river towns, the control of the river for navigation, the development of preserves, parks, and recreation areas, the lumber industry, and commercial fishing. The book concludes by examining the resurgence of river-oriented development, as river towns are once again embracing the Mississippi.

Generously illustrated with maps, engravings, ephemera, and historic and present-day photographs, Grand Excursions on the Upper Mississippi River will be of interest to tourists and residents of the area, river aficionados, railroad and steamboat history buffs, as well as academics interested in the history, geography, and regional development of the area.

Published in 1979 by Gnomon Press

In Groundwork, Robert Morgan offers a vivid poetic excavation of Appalachian life, memory, and landscape. Drawing deeply from his upbringing in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Morgan crafts a collection that is both intimate and elemental. These poems explore the textures of rural existence—its labor, rituals, and natural rhythms—through language that is spare, musical, and richly evocative.

Morgan’s verse is rooted in place, yet it transcends regionalism through its mythic resonance and emotional clarity. He sifts through family lore, childhood recollections, and local history to recover what he calls “pieces of the morgenland”—a personal and cultural terrain shaped by hardship, resilience, and wonder. The poems in Groundwork are populated by grandparents, farmers, and mountain folk, rendered with a quiet reverence that elevates the everyday to the numinous.

This collection marks a foundational moment in Morgan’s career, establishing the poetic voice that would inform his later fiction and nonfiction. With titles like “Mountain Bride,” “Burning the Hornet’s Nest,” and “Baptism of Fire,” the poems evoke both the physical and spiritual dimensions of Appalachian life. Groundwork remains one of Morgan’s most concentrated and enduring tributes to the Southern mountains and their people.

Essential for readers of American poetry, Appalachian studies, and environmental literature, Groundwork is a lyrical testament to the power of memory and place.