While all indications are that the number of people who indulge in personal reading continues to fall across this country, approximately 25% of the public claims still claims to read for a little more than an hour each day to satisfy their literary urges.
Nonfiction far outweighs fiction as the reading material of choice by most these days, but a good work of fiction can still take the reader to either far away places or familiar settings and create a "whole new world" of experience and comprehension.
One of the best authors of that genre may be someone that the casual reader is not aware of, but Janice Holt Giles, who spent much for early life in Western Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma, was both commercially successful and acclaimed for her historical works compassing a wide geographical era in a largely southern and Appalachian setting.
Giles, who was born in Altus in Franklin County on March 28 1905 the second child of educatorsJohn Albert Holt and Lucy Elizabeth McGraw Holt, started her writing career in 1946 and for the next 29 years produced 24 volumes that were both literary and commercial successes.
When Giles was still an infant, the family moved to Haileyville in Oklahoma territory approximately 130 miles from Altus. When she was four they relocated to Kinta in Haskell County before moving to Fort Smith 1917.
Giles received her public education in the Fort Smith school system and graduated from Fort Smith High School in 1922. One year later she married her high school sweetheart a man by the name of Otto Moore and in 1924 her only child, Elizabeth Ann Moore, was born.
All indications are the union between Janice and her husband was not a happy one and after being estranged for a few years they finally divorced in 1939.
After that divorce, Giles and her daughter relocated to Pulaski County where she served for several years as a religious educator in a number of schools. She was later employed as director of religious education at a Frankfort, Kentucky church but resigned that position and returned to Arkansas to help care for her ailing father, who died in Fort Smith in 1940.
The following year she moved back to Kentucky this time to work as secretary to the dean of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
In 1943 while on a 40-hour bus trip she became acquainted with a soldier on his way to report to serve a tour of duty in Europe during World War II . She corresponded with that soldier and when Henry Giles return from the European Theater on October 10, 1945, Janice and Henry were married the following day.
The young couple made their new home in Louisville, Kentucky where Janice continued working at a seminary and Henry worked at a factory during the day and studied at night to complete his high school education.
In 1946 Janice wrote her first novel, The Enduring Hills as part of a fiction writing contest. The book was published in 1950 and was based on Henry's verbal stories about his family in the Knifley community in rural Adair County, Kentucky.
That novel inspired two more books, Miss Willie and Tara's Healing which came to comprise what has become forever known as The Piney Ridge trilogy.
During her writing career Giles also pinned one other trilogy. The three volumes in that work, The Kentuckians, Hannah Fowler, and The Believers--all written between 1953 and 1957 --became the basis for numerous television and movie projects over the years.
Although she became associated with the state of Kentucky to the point that her tombstone bears the epithet "Kentucky Author", Giles maintained close connections with her family in Arkansas, visiting frequently, and wrote two novels set in her home state. Both The Plum Thicket and Johnny Osage remain must read novels for those interested in Arkansas-based fiction.
In the early fifties Janice and Henry Giles moved from Louisville to Adair County within two miles of the area were Henry's ancestors had been among the early settlers in the region.
They constructed a house over the course of four years using the logs of four pioneer cabins and lived there until Janice died of congestive heart failure in 1979.
Henry continued to live in the house and died in 1986 and was buried next to his beloved wife and the Caldwell Chapel Separate Baptist Church cemetery in Knifly, Kentucky.
The Janice Holt Giles and Henry Giles Society was established in 1996 to preserve the literary legacy of Janice Holt Giles and Henry Giles and to restore their log home.
The interested reader can gain a solid understanding of the early process of national expansion of the United States by reading the listed volumes in the following order:
The Kentuckians (1775–1778; VA, KY, TN)
Hannah Fowler (1778–1781; KY, TN, OH)
The Land Beyond the Mountains (1781–1792; KY, PA, IN)
The Believers (1795–1805; KY)
Johnny Osage (1821; OK, AR)
The Voyage to Santa Fe (1823; OK, TX, NM)
Savanna (1829–1834; OK, AR)
The Great Adventure (1834; CO, NM,)
Run Me a River (September 1861; KY, IN)
Six Horse Hitch (1859-1869; NE, CO).
The Damned Engineers (1944 Europe)
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