During Gurney Norman's sophomore year, the death of his older brother, a senior football hero who Gurney depended on greatly, deeply affected him. Gurney, however, went on to graduate from Stuart Robinson, a settlement school he attended in Letcher County, and the University of Kentucky to become recognized as one of the most powerful Appalachians of the times.  

         Gurney Norman lived the lives he wrote about, born in Grundy, Virginia, in 1937, he grew up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia, moving from kinsfolk to kinsfolk, during the 40's and 50's. Norman, as a personality as well as a writer has been labeled as powerful and compelling. He emerged from the Appalachian mountains, armed with a vision. He wrote his first story, Divine Right's Trip, in what some believe to be a reversal of what is expected, a saga of a group of California hippies traveling from the west to the east, towards Eastern Kentucky, stoned much of the the time and swearing constantly. The hippies settle on a farm in Eastern Kentucky raising rabbits and using rabbit pellets to reclaim abandoned strip mines.

         Norman's characters are imperfect people but hold dear the old-fashioned values of the people of the mountains--even when they cannot exemplify them. This holds true in all of Norman's writings. Gurney relived his character's dream in Divine Right's Trip by returning to Eastern Kentucky working as a reporter for the Hazard Herald and later became a teacher and writer-in residence at the University of Kentucky.