Hailing from the small river town of Moundsville, West Virginia, Davis Grubb (1919-1980) became a key figure in the canon of Appalachian literature. The author of ten novels and dozens of short stories and radio plays, Grubb's writings, as Tom Douglass observes, ""catalogued his life"". This biography, the first ever written of Grubb, captures his life and work in all their intriguing complexity.