The parable of the railway agent: stories of progress and winter legumes in the twentieth-century South

William Thomas Okie, Kennesaw State University

Abstract

This essay examines the abbreviated fiction-writing career of an unlikely author, Central of Georgia Railway agricultural agent Jesse Frisbie Jackson. In the process, the essay explores the centrality of storytelling to the early twentieth-century United States, to farming and agricultural reform, and to the historical profession.