In the Valley of the Shadows: Hard Times in Coal by Bruce Jackson

In the Valley of the Shadows: Hard Times in Coal Country brings together, for the first time, Bruce Jackson's unforgettable account of eastern Kentucky with the photographs he made while among the people whose lives he chronicles.

Originally written after Jackson's 1969 journey into Pike County, Kentucky, the text is both eyewitness reporting and enduring social history. Through miners, families, organizers, community leaders, and those struggling simply to survive, Jackson reveals a world shaped by coal, poverty, labor, and political conflict. More than fifty years later, his observations remain startlingly relevant.

The photographs, many published here for the first time, do far more than illustrate an essay. They preserve moments of extraordinary intimacy: children playing in shadowed hollers, exhausted miners emerging from underground, families enduring impossible circumstances, landscapes scarred by extraction yet marked by profound human resilience.




Bruce Jackson is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He is currently SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture at the University at Buffalo. He is author or editor of fifty books. His articles and photographs have appeared in academic journals and in periodicals such as Harper’s, Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Texas Monthly, Oxford American, and the Times Literary Supplement. He is an associate member of New York’s Wooster Group, which has produced two plays based on his work. Some of his recent books are In the Arctic with Malaurie (BlazeVOX 2026), Leslie Fiedler: Kind of a Conversation (with Diane Christian, SUNY Press 2026), Folklore Matters: Incursions in the Field 1965-2021 (SUNY Press 2024), The Story is True: Expanded edition (SUNY Press 2022), Ways of the Hand: A Photographer’s Memoir (SUNY Press, 2022), Voices from Death Row, second edition (with Diane Christian, SUNY Press 2022) and Changing Tense: Thirty memento mori (BlazeVOX 2021). He is a Guggenheim Fellow (1971), a chevalier in France’s Ordre national du Mérite (2012) and Ordre national des arts et des letters (2002), and an associate member of the Folklore Fellows (Finnish National Academy of Science and Letters 1995).


Book Information:

· Paperback: 108 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-552-6

$22