Selected Works of Jeff Biggers

Don West: No Lonesome Road
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Edited by Jeff Biggers and George Brosi
Don West sprang from a southern mountain family to become a populist poet, and teacher, a minister and a labor organizer. With Myles Horton he co-founded the Highlander Folk School and worked throughout his life for the rights of the poor. He was also an early spokesperson for civil rights. In the introduction, Biggers gives a brief biographical sketch tracing the education and history of West, a neglected literary voice of the south. He compares West to the northern populist poet Carl Sandburg, and credits West as a major influence on his own writing.

The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America
Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006
Biggers traces the contributions of southern mountain people to the American Revolution, the publishing industry, the desegregation movement, American Indian rights and cultural growth of the nation. His true stories place Appalachian people in the vanguard of the nation’s development.

In the Sierra Madre
University of Illinois Press, 2006
This book is based on the author’s one-year sojourn in the Sierra Madre. He spent the time living and working with the Raramuri people of Mexico’s Copper Canyon country, the country which was also the setting of the 1948 film, “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston. It was based on the novel with the same title, written by the mysterious B. Traven.
Aside from documenting the Raramuri culture in the village Mawichi, Biggers included descriptions of the villagers’ interaction with Spanish speaking Mexicans, missionaries, and tourists. He also describes the introduction of Raramuri musicians there to his banjo and some Appalachian tunes. The narrative is dense with history, natural history and a view of American-Mexican diplomacy and politics.