Local: Bill Knight to give reading from novel
Posted in Local, Uncategorized with tags bill knight, library on February 13, 2009 by Billy Dennis[Press release]
Journalist Bill Knight is scheduled to present a reading and a brief presentation about a neglected area author at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 25 at Alpha Park Library in Bartonville.
Knight edited and wrote an introduction for a new edition of Horse Shoe Bottoms, a 1935 novel by west-central Illinois native Tom Tippett. Born to immigrant parents, Tippett started work as a coal miner in the Peoria area and went on to become a union activist, an accomplished writer, a New Deal government employee and a labor educator.
His only novel, Horse Shoe Bottoms is about Illinois’ coal culture in the late 19th century. It follows the arrival of European miners in the Illinois River valley, where they work for a friendly ex-miner who eventually loses his company to other business interests that exploit the operation and its labor force. Strife and strikes, violence and reconciliation all follow, with sturdy John Stafford unionizing miners as his wife Ellen copes with the zeal of the miners to organize and her need to provide a better home for her family.
In the 1930s, the New York Times praised the book: “Tippett has told his story with warmth and feeling, and he has told it fairly. A moving and all-too-gentle story, it is a plain story without flourishes or melodrama; and it is one that is well told in terms of convincingly real and living people.”
Knight is a journalist who writes for area newspapers, does weekly commentaries on public radio, and teaches at Western Illinois University.
Alpha Park Library is at 3527 S. Airport Road in Bartonville; (309) 697-3822.
