Harry Harrison Kroll (1888–1967)

Harry Harrison Kroll (1888-1967). Novelist, short story author, illustrator, professor. Kroll taught English composition and literature at the University of Tennessee at Martin between 1935 and 1958, and at Lincoln Memorial University between 1926 and 1928. At the latter he was a literary catalyst for Appalachian writers Jesse Stuart, Don West, and James Still.

Born in 1888, Kroll spent most of his childhood in Dyersburg, Tennessee and his teen years and young adulthood in southern Alabama. Never formally education as a child, he nonetheless hammered together enough informal education on his own and with tutoring to qualify for a teaching certificate. Between 1911 and 1920 he taught in Alabama's rural schools. Marrying Annette Heard in 1911, he enrolled for a college education at Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, where he took baccalaureate and masters' degrees in 1923 and 1925. At Peabody he began selling short stories to the city's periodical publishers. During his career, story papers and magazines published over 900 pieces of short fictions and essays. Beginning in 1928 he became a novelist and eventually added another 27 volumes to his list of publications. His work is notable for a gritty realism focusing on rural life of the American South.