I’d Like to Kiss You, but I Just Washed my Hair: Tennessee Writer Harry Harrison Kroll

Every summer, I pick a different lesser-known Tennessee author from the past and add some of his or her work to my reading list. This summer, I’ve selected novelist, short story author, illustrator and professor Harry Harrison Kroll (1888-1967). Both his subjects and the way he writes about them provide a fascinating bridge back several generations in West Tennessee history.

For me, reading the work of writers like Kroll is a way to add depth and texture to the research of southern history and ancestry that’s mostly made up of names, dates and places.

The University of Tennessee at Martin, where his collection is archived, describes Kroll’s writing as “notable for a gritty realism focusing on rural life of the American South.” In “Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary,” he’s described as a “realistic chronicler of southern rural and mountain life and a writer with proletarian sensibility.”

The Cabin in the Cotton

Bette Davis discussing her role in “The Cabin in the Cotton”

Kroll’s third book, The Cabin in the Cotton, was sold to Warner Bros. and made into a film staring Bette Davis in 1932. It was her eleventh film, and in it Davis delivered the long-forgotten but well-delivered line, “I’d like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair.” It’s said that was one of Davis’ favorite lines from all her films. Also starring Dorothy Jordan, who was born in Clarksville, Tennessee, the plot of both the book and the film features a tenant farmer’s son caught in the middle of owner-tenant disputes when he falls for the plantation owner’s seductive daughter. You can guess which part Davis played.

Kroll’s writing was more popular than literary, and he published a large body of work—nearly 30 books and more than 900 short stories—so there’s a lot to include on my list of his work to read this summer. 

I was a Sharecropper

I recently completed I was a Sharecropper which was published in 1937 by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. A reviewer for the New York Times wrote in the Oct. 31, 1937 issue, “Mr. Kroll has written an interesting, indeed an amazing book about a share-cropper’s family, tied to the earth by toil, and of their constant wanderings to find better landowners for whom to work in the West Tennessee lowlands.”

I knew from the first page I was going to enjoy the book and the way Kroll uses words to paint a picture of the lives of early West Tennessee settlers. Here’s a sample:

We were going deeper into the bottoms now. It was spring of the year, and sometime in an afternoon. Directly the twilight through which we moved became perpetual. Above the wagon the branches and limbs lapped and intertwined. If a fleck of sunlight fell upon the top of the wagon, I could lie back and watch the leaf patterns crawl along the canvas to the rear and seem to fall off, though I could never catch one. Birdy slept. She was five years old, a dimple-legged healthy girl-child, with corn-silk hair and gray-blue eyes. She lay on a musty quilt on the floor of the wagon bed, rolling when the wagon rolled; and moisture collected on her face and around her mouth, and with soil made rings on her fat neck.

I’ve Never Been Rich

This weekend, I’ve been reading Never Been Rich, a very thorough biography of Kroll written by Richard Saunders. At the time the book was published in 2011, Saunders was associate professor of library science and curator and archivist at UT Martin. Today, he serves as the Dean of Library Services at Southern Utah University.

Harry Harrison Kroll was born to Darius Wesley and Caroline (Cripe) Kroll near Hartford City, Indiana on February 18, 1888.

After a childhood spent primarily in Dyersburg, Tennessee with no formal education, Kroll and his brother became traveling photographers around the Delta. Kroll, discovering the need for teachers in small town schools, decided education was the key to a better life than one spent sharecropping or taking and selling photographs. He worked hard to learn what he could to obtain a teaching certificate. He then married teacher Annette “Nettie” Heard and they taught in rural schools in Alabama from 1911 to 1920. Kroll then attended George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville where he earned a baccalaureate degree in 1923 and a masters’ degree 1925.

After years of teaching and publishing mostly popular fiction, he landed at UT Martin where he taught writing composition from 1934-58 where, according to an article published about Saunders’ biography of Kroll in NWTN Today in Nov. 2011, “his eclectic and blunt personality gained him the status of one of the most popular professors on campus.”

“They say the book was ‘throbbing, vital, absorbing.” You’ll say the same thing about the picture!” From “The Cabin in the Cotton” movie poster

From a column distributed by Warner Bros. that appeared in Missoula, Montana’s The Missoulian, April 11, 1932

Warner Bros. used Kroll’s story as part of their publicity around the film and they clearly didn’t let the truth stand in the way of a good narrative.

Although Kroll failed to find the literary respect and legacy of some of the other southern writers of his day, he found his biggest fans as a teacher and was extremely popular with the other professors and students at UT Martin. 

Kroll died on June 11, 1967 and was buried next to his wife at Edgewood Cemetery in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The Murfreesboro, Tennessee Daily News-Journal, June 13, 1967

The Jackson Sun, July 4, 1967

Kroll’s Legacy

After Kroll died, some of his papers and other personal collections were given to the University of Memphis. Decades later, more material from his family was given to the University of Tennessee at Martin.

Today, Harry Harrison Kroll has pretty much been forgotten. However, the work he left behind offers a glimpse at some of the texture and nuance in the lives of the early settlers of West Tennessee.

Richard Saunders beautifully concludes his biography of Kroll with, “Harry Kroll sowed his work in the rural settings he knew best as a young adult and kicked at the comparatively poor crop he reaped, but he did not mind toiling in the hardscrabble field of literature, where there is always work for new field hands.”

Here’s a partial list of works published by Kroll.

You can find more about my family lines at HaywoodCountyLine.com or read more blog posts about the history of West Tennessee on my blog page.

Sources:

• The Harry Harrison Kroll Collection at The University of Tennessee at Martin
• Cox, Ricky. “Never Been Rich: The Life and Work of a Southern Ruralist Writer, Harry Harrison Kroll (review).” West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies, vol. 6 no. 2, 2012, pp. 91-92. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/wvh.2012.0020
• Flora M., Joseph and Vogel, Amber. Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
• Saunders, Richard L. Never Been Rich: The Life and Work of a Southern Ruralist Writer, Harry Harrison Kroll. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press Knoxville, 2011.