John T. Moore was born on August 26, 1858, at Marion, Alabama, the son of John Moore and Emily Adelia Billingslea. He was of Scotch-Irish descent. His father, a circuit judge in Alabama, came of a family distinguished in early South and North Carolina history, and served as captain in the Confederate army. His mother was of a pioneer Georgia family.
Moore graduated from Howard College in 1878, now known as Samford University, where he studied the classics. While in college, he wrote The Howard College Magazine.
Moore started his career as a journalist for The Marion Commonwealth, a newspaper in Marion, Alabama. For the next six years he taught school at Monterey and at Pineapple, Alabama, establishing Moore's Academy at the latter place. Meanwhile he studied law and passed bar examinations, but never practised.
In 1885 he moved to Maury County, Tennessee, where on a farm near Columbia he began to raise blooded stock. Like the Southern gentlemen whose tradition he shared and understood, Moore knew and loved horses but was about equally inclined to literature. The spirit of the Middle Tennessee region into which he had come stirred him to write, and he became its genial yet passionate interpreter, contributing first to the Columbia Herald and more prominently later to the Chicago Horse Review. "Trotwood, " first chosen from David Copperfield as a pen-name, so clung to him that he adopted it as a middle name. Moore's advocacy of the pacing horse, then coming into favor largely through performances of the Tennessee Hal strain, and his expert knowledge of the breed, got him a regular engagement with the Review, which he continued until 1904.
In 1897 he published Songs and Stories from Tennessee, a collection of sketches and poems that had appeared in the Review. It contained his famous race-horse story, "Ole Mistis, " and stories of Uncle Wash, a negro creation drawn from life and one of the most authentic representations of the Southern negro in American literature.
In 1901 he published his first novel, A Summer Hymnal, a romantic story with a Tennessee setting, and began a series of works that won him a devoted following. Although he was a sincere romanticist and hero-worshipper, with a decided turn for the tradition of pathos and gallantry, he offset many of the faults of the sentimental school by his irresistible humor, good use of local detail, and variety of characters. He was himself the epitome of the Southern traits he interpreted--a personality genial and positive, leisurely yet fiery; and his books were not only stories but garnerings of his philosophizing and observations. But with these qualities there appeared in The Bishop of Cottontown (1906) a social consciousness in advance of his time; it was perhaps the first important Southern novel to treat industrial forces that were changing Southern life.
It was followed in 1910 by Uncle Wash, His Stories, and The Old Cotton Gin, a poem, and in 1911 by The Gift of the Grass, the autobiography of a race-horse, perhaps his best-written novel.
In 1905 Moore had established Trotwood's Monthly, into which he poured anecdote, history, story, and verse.
In 1906 he moved to Nashville. Changing the title of the monthly to the Taylor-Trotwood Magazine, he edited it jointly with Senator Robert Love Taylor of Tennessee until 1911, when it was discontinued. After publishing Jack Ballington, Forester, in 1911, he turned his attention largely to Tennessee history.
From 1919 until his death he was director of libraries, archives, and history for Tennessee and did extensive and valuable pioneer work in collecting original documents, erecting markers and memorials, and stimulating historical enterprises. In 1923, with Austin P. Foster, he published Tennessee, the Volunteer State (4 vols. ). His devotion to Andrew Jackson, whose career he had long studied, was the basis of his last novel, Hearts of Hickory (1926), a spirited historical romance in which he dramatized the episodes of Jackson's early battles.
From 1926 until his death he wrote occasional articles on historical subjects, constantly made journeys and filled speaking engagements among the people to whom he had become a familiar and beloved figure, and was at work almost to his last moment on another, unfinished novel. He died on May 10, 1929, of heart failure at his Nashville home, Tennessee.
(Excerpt from The Gift of the Grass: Being the Autobiograp...)
(Excerpt from The Bishop of Cottontown a Story of the Sout...)
(Excerpt from A Summer Hymnal: A Romance of Tennessee F p...)
(Jack Ballington, Forester by John Trotwood Moore I am th...)
John Trotwood Moore was a "racist. " His racist ideas were reinforced by his reading Joseph Widney's 1907 Race Life of the Aryan Peoples, a book recommended to him by Theodore Roosevelt, which Moore proceeded to review favorably.
He was a defender of the Ku Klux Klan and a proponent of lynching. Additionally, Moore was francophobic for racist reasons, lambasting the French for "intermarrying with the Indians and treating them as equals" during the French colonization of the Americas.
In February 1885, John T. Moore married Florence W. Allen. After his first wife died in 1896, Moore married Mary Brown Daniel on June 13, 1900. They had a son, and two daughters.
Austin Merrill Moore was an American psychiatrist and poet.
