Eliot Wigginton

Eliot Wigginton (born Brooks Eliot Wigginton on November 9, 1942) is an American oral historian, folklorist, writer and former educator. He is most widely known for developing with his high school students the Foxfire Project, a writing project consisting of interviews and stories about Appalachia. The project was developed into a magazine and series of best-selling Foxfire books. The series comprised essays and articles by high school students from Rabun County, Georgia focusing on Appalachian culture. In 1987, Wigginton was named "Georgia Teacher of the Year," and in 1989, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1992, Wigginton confessed to and was convicted of child molestation. Early life Brooks Eliot Wigginton was born in West Virginia on November 9, 1942. His mother, Lucy Freelove Smith Wigginton, died eleven days later of "pneunomia due to acute pulmonary edema," according to her death certificate. His maternal grandmother, Margaret Pollard Smith, was an associate professor of English at Vassar College and his father was a famous landscape architect, named Brooks Edward Wigginton. His family called him Eliot. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in English from Cornell University and a second Master's from Johns Hopkins University. In 1966, he began teaching English in the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, located in the Appalachian Mountains of northeastern Georgia. Foxfire In 1966, Wigginton began a writing project with his students at Rabun Gap‐Nacooche High School, who began to compile written oral histories from local residents based on recorded interviews. In 1967, they started publishing the interviews, along with original articles and other student writing, in a quarterly magazine called Foxfire, named after local phosphorescent lichen. Topics included folklife practices, recipes, customs associated with farming, and the rural life of southern Appalachia, as well as the folklore and oral histories of local residents.