‘Kind and generous,’ Gurney Norman, Kentucky writer and teacher, dies at 88

Beloved Kentucky writer Gurney Norman, whose fiction chronicled life in Appalachia and the 1960s counterculture, died Oct. 12. He was 88.

Norman taught and mentored generations of aspiring writers as the University of Kentucky’s director of creative writing and a professor of English. 

He was Kentucky’s poet laureate and the recipient of many awards and honors including an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Berea College and an affiliation with novelist Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.

Norman’s legacy — “the tail of his comet” — will live on in “all the writers to whom he’s been tremendously influential,” said Willie Davis, a writer in Lexington and creative writing teacher at Kentucky State University. “He was kind and generous with his time.”

Davis said reading Norman’s work, especially “Kinfolks,” opened his eyes by depicting Appalachia in ways more alive and vivid than common stereotypical treatments. “He writes with such precision. His characters are so full of life. It really enraptured me. I told him if everyone wrote about a mountain like you write about a mountain, no one would ever tear another mountain down.”

Gurneyfest

In the fall of 2023, Norman’s fans, friends and scholars gathered at UK for a two-day Gurneyfest that included music, readings, discussions and a screening of “The Wilgus Stories,” a trilogy of short films starring Ned Beatty and otherwise unknown actors adapted from the short story collection “Kinfolks.” 

Published in 1977 and told through the eyes of young Wilgus Collier, a coal miner’s son, the stories illuminate “the universal experiences of love, loss, and finding one’s way in the world,” says a KET description.

In an interview in 2001 with KET producer Guy Mendes, Norman, who was born in Grundy, Virginia, remembered growing up between two sets of grandparents, one in southwestern Virginia, one near Hazard in the Perry County coal camp of Allais.

His mother, a teacher, and his father, a coal miner, exposed him to books and ideas.

“I remember enjoying so much hanging around with my dad on days off with all his buddies, these miners. And they would all be clean and have on a nice clean shirt, and they were enjoying being out in the sunshine. And their talk was … It was excellent, it was wonderful. I could listen forever. And the best part about it for me was the humor,” Norman told Mendes.

“I remember a hundred times, probably, these friends of my dad’s — you know, I was like 4 and 5 and 6 years old — but one of his buddies every now and then would grab the seat of my pants, and he would say, ‘Well, I can tell you’re going to be a miner by the slack in your pants.’ And this was a kind of teasing that was very benign. But I just remember everybody being articulate and very creative with language.”

Norman said he knew from age 15 — the year his father died — that he wanted to be a writer. “You know, that was an emotional upset. I don’t think I showed it, but I remember soon after he died I just felt this need to write stories.” He received some encouragement from a teacher and also wrote for his high school newspaper and yearbook.

‘Kentucky Fab Five’

Arriving at the University of Kentucky in 1955, he first majored in journalism, writing a satirical column for the student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, before gravitating to literature and the English department where he studied with professors Hollis Summers Jr.  and Robert Hazel.

Also studying creative writing at UK and striking up lifelong friendships with Norman and each other were soon-to-be acclaimed Kentucky writers Wendell Berry, the late Ed McClanahan and the late James Baker Hall.

“They were exciting times. It was a time of ferment,” Norman recalled.

Bobbie Ann Mason, who would become a bestselling novelist, also was a student in the UK English department. They came to be known as the “Kentucky Fab Five” for their literary accomplishments. 

On Friday nights, Norman recalled, the Paddock Club on the corner of Euclid and Rose streets, “was the most interesting and fabulous quasi-Bohemian place that you could find — based not on espresso, but on beer.” 

Wendell Berry’s daughter Mary Berry on Tuesday said Norman has long held a special place in their family.

“My father Wendell called Gurney his Virgil. My mother Tanya Berry was in a poetry class with Gurney and didn’t finish the class because she gave birth to me. My daughter Virginia who works with me at The Berry Center chose ‘Kinfolks’ as our Agrarian Literary League read for 2025 at The Berry Center.

“I could go on and on with connections and memories. He was a part of our family and loving him was a part of us. Missing him will be a part of us, too. There won’t be another like him,” she said.

In 1960, Norman received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University where he studied with literary critic Malcolm Cowley and the Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor.

At Stanford, Norman and McClanahan became friends with Ken Kesey, also studying creative writing, and soon to be author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion.”

‘Divine Right’s Trip’

While Kesey gained fame for an LSD-fueled cross-country trip in an old bus from his home in Oregon, Norman wrote about a fictional journey from California to a Kentucky mountain farm in “Divine Right’s Trip: A Novel of the Counterculture,” published in 1971 by Stewart Brand in The Last Whole Earth Catalog.

The novel follows “Divine Right (D. R.) Davenport, a restless young man on a journey of self-discovery, as he embarks on a cross-country road trip in his beloved but unreliable old Volkswagen bus, Urge,” according to a description by Ohio University Press.

Brand, who was Norman’s neighbor in Menlo Park, California, paid him a monthly stipend of $300 to write the novel. “In the ’60s one could live a happy life on that,” Norman told Dee Davis in a 2021 interview in The Daily Yonder.

“And so, I sat down and started making up a story right out of … I don’t know, I just started making it up. And when the chips are down and someone says here’s an opportunity, ‘Just make it up.’ Well, you just start making it up. And it helped that I myself had become a kind of alternative person and had had certain visionary experiences.”

“Divine Right’s Trip” was later published by the Dial Press, Bantam Books and Gnomon Press. 

Along the way Norman, who had been in ROTC, served two years in the U.S. Army; was a reporter for the Hazard Herald in Kentucky, and staffed a fire tower in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, before joining the English faculty at UK in 1979.

He was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2019.

His nonfiction includes “Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region” written with Dwight B. Billings and Katherine Ledford, published by the University Press of Kentucky, and “An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature” with Danny Miller and Sharon Hatfield, published by the Ohio University Press.

Other fiction includes “Book One From Crazy Quilt: A Novel in Progress” published by  Larkspur Press and “Ancient Creek: A Folktale” published by Old Cove Press, a Lexington publishing house founded by Nyoka Hawkins, Norman’s wife of 29 years.

Hawkins, in announcing Norman’s death Monday on Facebook, wrote, “Gurney’s spirit was so vast, so powerful and affirming, he will never leave us. We have his words, his stories and his books, the gift of his brilliant and graceful writing. 

“But his presence in the world, his essence, his being, was so much larger than books. He was a force of generous, irresistible love that a hundred books could never contain. I feel him here with me now as I write this, urging me on with those amazing blue eyes and powerful smile.”

Hawkins said his health challenges had mounted in the last four months and that “he went peacefully, no pain, no struggle.”

She said a memorial and celebration of Gurney Norman’s life will be held later this year.

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