Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal - Paperback

Award-Winning Environmental Memoir of Coal Country Pennsylvania

A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Award winner

"Young's memoir of her hometown is as powerful a picture as Inness' painting, revealing its harsh transformation a century later."

--BOOKLIST

In 1855, the landscape painter George Inness began work on his commissioned painting The Lackawanna Valley. A century later, a girl in Scranton, Pennsylvania, looks out over her coal-strewn homeland wishing for beauty and wondering where the artist had stood with his canvas. The interplay between the two stories is at the heart of Catherine Young's memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored By Coal.

A Lyric Work of Environmental History

Young invites readers into a world now vanished, but which lingers in shimmering portraits. This lyric work of environmental history gives voice to the birthplace of the industrial revolution in North America and the consequences for the people and the forgotten valley that once powered the nation. Through personal narrative and historical reflection, Black Diamonds explores the transformation of the Lackawanna Valley and the lasting impact of coal mining on communities and landscapes.

Memoir That Bridges Past and Present

The memoir weaves together two timelines: the 19th-century creation of Inness's commissioned landscape painting and a mid-20th-century childhood in the same transformed valley. This dual narrative structure reveals how industrial progress reshaped both the physical landscape and the lives of those who called it home. The book serves as both personal memoir and environmental documentation of a region that fueled America's industrial growth.