Anne Wetzell Armstrong adored her adopted hometown.
Of Time and Knoxville is a must-read for lovers of Knoxville, Victorian America, women\'s history, and memoir..
Armstrong also details the tragic Flat Creek train wreck of 1889, which seriously injured her own father and led to his death five years later.
Complemented by Linda Behrend\'s excellent introduction and meticulous annotations, this distinctive memoir also delivers an unusual picture of Knoxville\'s beloved Market Square and vividly depicts fin de siècle Knoxville, with its great food at hotel restaurants and lively events at dance halls.
Sophisticated and witty, Of Time and Knoxville provides lively, sometimes scandalous sketches of such well-known Knoxville figures as Lizzie Crozier French, Armstrong\'s mentor and a leader in the woman\'s suffrage movement
Perez Dickinson, businessman and owner of the socially popular Island Home farm (and cousin of Emily Dickinson); and Mary Boyce Temple, clubwoman, philanthropist, and socialite, whose home is preserved as the last extant single-family residence in downtown Knoxville.
Journalist John Gunther\'s 1946 description of Knoxville as the ugliest city I ever saw in America served as the impetus for Armstrong to pen a memoir of a city she remembered quite differently.
Her second novel, This Day and Time (1930), is regarded as the first fictional work to treat Appalachia realistically.
She was divorced (she later married an Armstrong of Knoxville\'s Bleak House), a single mother, and worked--not only as a teacher at Knoxville Girls High School but also in personnel with National City Company of New York and in industrial relations at Eastman Kodak.
Author of The Seas of God (1915), set in a thinly disguised Knoxville (called Kingsville), Armstrong was privileged, unconventional, and modern.
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she moved with her family to the West End (Fort Sanders) area of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1880s, a pivotal decade for a city just getting past the trauma of the Civil War and becoming an economically diverse and culturally cosmopolitan center.
Anne Wetzell Armstrong adored her adopted hometown
