Hubert Skidmore

Who was Hubert Skidmore?

Hubert Skidmore was an American author. His twin brother was novelist Hobert Skidmore, and he was married to the novelist Maritta Wolff, author of Whistle Stop and a fellow student at the University of Michigan, in 1942. He died in a house fire in 1946. He is best known for his social protest novel Hawk's Nest, an account of the disaster at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia during the Great Depression.

Skidmore's novels divide into three groups. River Rising!, Hill Doctor and Hill Lawyer, which are juvenile literature, form a loose trilogy around York Allen, who works as a schoolteacher in a rough logging community to earn money for medical school, then returns as a doctor to treat the illnesses and injuries of the people of rural West Virginia.

I Will Lift Up My Eyes and its sequel Heaven Came So Near concern the difficult transition of the Cutlip family as they move from their isolated farm to life and work in a lumber camp.

Hawk's Nest chronicles the experience of a wide range of representative characters as they are touched by the disaster surrounding the construction of the Gauley Bridge tunnel.