At the end of the Civil War there was intense concern for and interest in things southern. In 1873, Edward King, on assignment for Scribner's Monthly, toured the South with a photographer and gathered material for a series of articles and sketches published serially in Scribner's as The Great South. In New Orleans, King became acquainted with the work of George Washington Cable and sent two of his stories back to New York; one of these, ‘“Sieur George,” appeared in Scribner's in October 1873. The popularity of King's pieces and Cable's story prompted Harper's Monthly to assign Edwin DeLeon to do a series called The New South, and the southern Local Color movement was underway. Writers in all sections of the South began to exploit the traditions of their region. Cable was joined by Kate Chopin and Grace Elizabeth King in writing stories about the quaint and bizarre customs of the Creoles and Cajuns of New Orleans. Joel Chandler Harris wrote his Uncle Remus stories based on the unique superstitions, attitudes, and behavior patterns of the southern blacks. John Esten Cooke and Thomas Nelson Page produced their novels depicting life on the Virginia plantation. Sherwood Bonner celebrated the life of the hillbillies of Mississippi and the mountaineers of Tennessee. In the latter of these endeavors her work was surpassed in quantity—and perhaps in quality as well—by that of Mary Noailles Murfree.

Mary Murfree grew up on a twelve-hundred-acre plantation, near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a town named for her family. Her father, himself a lover of books, saw that Mary, her brother, and her sister were amply supplied with reading materials, particularly with the works of the better-known nineteenth-century English novelists. Left slightly lame by a childhood illness, Mary lived a rather secluded life, sharing her literary interests with her brother, sister, and father, who often read aloud to the entire family, and her fondness for music with her mother, an accomplished musician. Mary and her sister Fanny attended the Nashville Female Academy, studied French with a French governess, were taught Latin, mathematics, and Spanish by their father, and completed their formal education by attending for two years the Chegary Institute in Philadelphia.

For fifteen years the entire Murfree family spent their summers at Beersheba Springs, a popular watering place of that time in the Cumberland Mountains. Mary and Fanny also spent some time in the Great Smoky Mountains. In both of these settings Mary was able to observe closely the peculiarities of manners and customs of the natives, as her sharp ear was accurately recording the rhythm and sound of their idiomatic speech. In her youth Mary's father had encouraged her to write some stories, set in Mississippi and Kentucky, employing the Negro, Irish, and mountain dialects spoken by the natives of those regions. Later, after reading some of the local color stories with which the journals of the time were filled—and particularly a story of Rebecca Harding Davis's about the North Carolina mountaineers—she decided to write about the natives whose strange and unusual speech and behavior she had observed at Beersheba Springs. According to Fanny, Mary wanted to preserve the unique speech and behavior patterns of the Tennessee mountaineers—as other writers were doing for other regions—before the railroads, urbanization, and standardization destroyed them forever.

She began, therefore, a novel about these people she had observed so carefully during her summers at Beersheba Springs. After she had completed the first chapter, both she and her sister agreed that it was complete in itself; consequently she decided to try to publish it as a short story. Thinking its chances of being accepted would be enhanced had it been written by a man, she submitted it to William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, under the pseudonym of Charles Egbert Craddock (she had earlier published under the name of R. E. Dembry). Howells accepted the story, and it appeared as “The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove” in the Atlantic for May 1878. Howells published four other of the Craddock stories: “The Star in the Valley” (November 1878), “Electioneerin' on Big Injun Mounting” (January 1880), “The Romance of Sunrise Rock” (December 1880), and “Over on T'other Mounting” (June 1881). Howells's successor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, published three others: “The ‘Harnt’ that walks Chilhowee” (May 1883), “A-Playin' of Old Sledge at the Settlemint” (October 1883), and “Drifting Down Lost Creek” (March and April 1884). At the urging of Aldrich, the publishers Houghton Mifflin issued all of these stories as In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), the best of her ten novels and thirty-five short stories set in the Tennessee mountains of her time. Of the twenty-five books she published, the action of twenty-two of them occurs in her native state, and despite some obvious flaws of plotting and characterization, no one else has produced as much fiction about the people of Tennessee or rendered more accurately the dialect of the region.

The same year that In the Tennessee Mountains was published, J. R. Osgood brought out Where the Battle Was Fought, and the next book, Down the Ravine, was serialized by Wide-Wake, after which Houghton issued it in book form. Almost simultaneously The Atlantic Monthly carried The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains in seven installments. Again Houghton published this book, hard upon the heels of Down the Ravine. The name of no other author was more constantly before the eyes of the American reader in the early 1880s than that of Charles Egbert Craddock. As her stories became more popular, it was increasingly difficult for Miss Murfree to conceal the identity of her pseudonym. In 1884, for example, a St. Louis newspaper, where the Murfrees were then living, carried a brief note: “Another cold potato thrown at history. Charles Egbert Craddock isn't C.E.C. at all, but Mr. M. N. Murfree of St. Louis.” From all quarters the family was bombarded with questions about the identity of Mr. M. N. Murfree. It soon became evident that the secret could not be kept much longer. The family discussed the matter at some length and finally concluded, as Fanny Murfree indicated in an unpublished biography of her sister, “it was decided that it would be neither wise nor courteous to allow a disclosure of a kind touching their own affairs to be made to the publishers through some newspaper.” Mr. Murfree insisted, therefore, that Mary and Fanny arrange a meeting with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, which they promptly did. Fanny Murfree records Aldrich's astonishment when a slight, crippled spinster walked into the office of The Atlantic Monthly and announced she was Charles Egbert Craddock, the author of those action-filled, masculine-dominated stories of the Tennessee mountains. First he announced to his office staff that those ladies were sisters of Charles Egbert Craddock and hurried them into his private office.

[T]he next evening came the memorable dinner. The guests were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lawrence Barrett, and Mrs. James T. Fields. Miss [Sarah Orne] Jewett was ill and Edwin Booth sent regrets, as he never dined out on evenings that he played. W. D. Howells came in, although, having an engagement, he could not stay for dinner. As the guests were successively introduced to ‘Mr. Craddock,’ whom they had all been invited to meet, their surprise was supreme—most of all that of Mrs. Fields … [who] persistently called her ‘Miss Craddock.’

After dinner the party went to the theater, and Aldrich went back stage between acts and identified “Mr. Craddock” to Booth as “the fellow in the front of the box, with the red rose in his bonnet.” In this manner was the best kept literary secret of the nineteenth century revealed.

Murfree's art is severely restrained by the literary genre to which it belongs. After the local color writer has rendered faithfully or romantically his setting and recorded the odd behavior, the unusual customs and superstitions of the people of the region, as well as their unique manner of speech, there remains little for him to do. No plausible action that he could invent would be as interesting or compelling as the characteristics he has presented. Local color stories follow, therefore, a predictable pattern. At least the first third of the story is consumed with presenting in elaborate detail the setting and rendering as precisely as possible the strange customs and beliefs, usually based on superstition, and the bizarre behavior of the people. When the basic conflict of the story is introduced, usually a third or a half of the author's space has been used, and the part of the story that should command our closest attention, as we move through a series of resolved or unresolved complications toward a resolution of the conflict, is usually disappointing. Our most profound interest is not in why the characters do what they do; they act as they do because they are the kind of people they are. The extent to which the story commands our attention depends entirely upon the degree to which we are fascinated by the strange behavior of the characters. The author succeeds only if he convinces us not only that his characters speak a strange idiom but that they act in a manner peculiarly their own.

Miss Murfree's principal claim to fame is succinctly stated by Professor Nathalia Wright in her introduction to In the Tennessee Mountains, Murfree's least flawed collection of stories:

It would seem, in fact, that the southern mountaineers do not inspire individualized fictional treatments as do their kinsmen the poor whites—from the Georgia crackers of Longstreet to the Mississippi sharecroppers of Faulkner. These mountaineers, like those everywhere—and like most of the characters of all local color fiction—have achieved identity as a social group and in a circumscribed environment. Their culture, like that of all arrested groups, is static, a fact about all such groups which limits their usefulness to fiction. Though Miss Murfree does not make this point about Tennessee mountain culture explicitly, she implies as much throughout her first book about it, in her representation of the mountaineers and the mountains as by nature inseparable. The implication, indeed, may be her most significant achievement.