The Keeper of Stars

The Keeper of Stars takes place in multiple locations, but its primary setting is a fictional small town in Tennessee called Sims Chapel. Sim Chapel is supposed to be located northeast of Pigeon Forge, in the Smoky Mountains near Douglas Lake; it most likely takes its name from Sims Chapel Road and Sims Chapel Baptist Church, prominent real-life landmarks on the southern shore of Douglas Lake. This area of Tennessee is covered in rolling hills and low mountains, with small towns dotted around the heavily forested landscape. Douglas Lake is a 44-square-mile reservoir created from a damming of the French Broad River in the 1940s and has been a major recreational site since that time. The lake contains many small islands and is fed by numerous creeks and rivers. Parrott Island, where Jack and Ellie have two of their most significant dates during the summer of 1950, is a fictional version of one of these islands; it might be named for Parrott’s Chapel, a community in the same area south of Douglas Lake.

In the 1950s, rural Tennessee was undergoing a demographic shift because of the rising cost of farming, and many people were leaving the small towns to work in larger cities. Those who remained in the countryside were often impoverished, and towns like Sims Chapel began to depend in large part on the income brought in by tourists visiting the Smoky Mountains. In The Keeper of Stars, Jack grows up in poverty not uncommon for his time and place and, in the summers, works for a ferry company taking tourists out to the islands in Douglas Lake. In the off-season, Jack goes to work in a mill; difficult manual labor in small local industries was often the only way to earn a living wage in mid-century, small-town East Tennessee. Life was not all poverty and hard work, however. The Keeper of Stars evokes nostalgia for the strong community focus and traditional values typical of its Appalachian setting and paints a vivid, lyrical portrait of the natural beauty of East Tennessee.

Many highly regarded novels are set in East Tennessee—some in small cities like Knoxville and others in very rural environments. James Agee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Death in the Family, published in 1957, takes place in Knoxville. Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior is set on a Tennessee farm. Cormac McCarthy’s early Southern Gothic novels Suttree, Child of God, and The Orchard Keeper all take place in mid-century Tennessee; the settings of Child of God and The Orchard Keeper are particularly rural and isolated.