Chapter 1: Meet the man who focused the world on Eastern
Kentucky's woes bestep@herald-leader.comDecember 16, 2012 
Fifty years ago, lanky, loquacious Harry Monroe Caudill of
Letcher County climbed onto the national stage and tapped the
microphone.  For the April 1962 issue of The Atlantic, Caudill
wrote an essay none too subtly titled The Rape of the
Appalachians. He told of his native Eastern Kentucky mountains
and the out-of-state corporations decapitating them for coal
through strip mining. An accompanying photograph showed the
rubble of a demolished hillside.  "During the last 15 years,
coal-mine operators have systematically destroyed a broad
mountainous region lying within five states — Kentucky,
Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Alabama," he wrote. "By a
process which produces huge and immediate profits for a few
industrialists, the southern Appalachians are literally being
ripped to shreds."  Few Americans had given much thought to
Appalachia. Almost none had heard of Harry Caudill, small-town