Hawk's Nest
First Edition. First Printing. Skidmore's great, suppressed account of the Hawk's Nest tunnel disaster near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where as many as 800 men died from acute silicosis between 1930-31. Many thousands more suffered debilitating illness as a result of lax industrial safety laws and intentional mismanagement by the tunneling contractor, Union Carbide. According to Tom Douglass, who wrote the foreword to the 2004 reissue of Hawk's Nest, “perhaps only a few hundred original copies” of the book survived after Doubleday Doran, fearful of legal retribution from Union Carbide, pulled and destroyed the entire production run in 1941. Only the copies which had already been distributed to retailers survived, and many of these, too, were recalled. As a result, the novel - one of the finest 20th-century works by an Appalachian writer - remained practically unknown until its recent re-issue by the University of Tennessee Press.
Hubert Skidmore (1909-1946) was a West Virginia native and the author of five novels, all set in his native state. He died in a house fire in 1946, at the age of thirty-seven; the circumstances of his death were considered suspicious at the time, but allegations of arson were never proved.
Hubert Skidmore, (1909-1946).
Hawk's Nest.
New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1941.
Lehigh University Catalog Record: https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/Record/10994148
If you're interested in learning more about the historical events that inspired this novel, please refer to the links below:
"SILICOSIS: Tunneling Through an Atmosphere of Deadly Dust" in News-Week, vol. 7, no. 4, 25 January 1936.
"The Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster: Summersville, WV" by the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, West Virginia, National Park Service, 15 February 2022.
"Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster" by Martin G. Cherniack, e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia, 2 September 2021.
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